Good Morning Friends! Today would normally be considered “holiday mode” given that in the United States many of us are off today in celebration of the Independence Day weekend. However given that I do a thing on Mondays and only on Mondays… and have a nice backlog of mixtapes to go through I thought I would put forth the effort to keep things rolling. For those who might be new to this blog, each Monday I post a new custom curated mixtape of music, often times with a theme of some sort. As a kid I was a mixtape creator and crafted them for friends and recently I have fallen back into that tradition utilizing things like Spotify and YouTube to craft as close as you can get to the feeling of a digital mixtape.
Tapedeck Held Aloft
Being born in 1976, my “childhood” pretty neatly straddled the line between the 80s and the 90s and as such I largely consider myself a child of both decades. I am a sucker for a good John Hughes film and spent more than more than my share of time watching romcoms and teen movies from that era. This MixTape today is essentially my love letter to the soundtracks of those movies. If you are of a certain age, you can close your eyes and imagine the movies that went along with these songs or instead let it all sort of blend together into one sappy slurry.
- Hungry Like the Wolf – Duran Duran
- Take on Me – A-Ha
- The Promise – When in Rome
- Doctor! Doctor! – Thompson Twins
- Things Can Only Get Better – Howard Jones
- If You Leave – Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
- I Melt with You – Modern English
- Head Over Heels – Tears for Fears
- It’s My Life – Talk Talk
- The Goonies R’ Good Enough – Cyndi Lauper
- The Ghost in You – The Psychedelic Furs
- Voices Carry – Til Tuesday
- In Your Eyes – Peter Gabriel
- Don’t You Forget About Me – Simple Minds
Listen On Spotify
Listen On YouTube
Listen On Tidal
There you have it, my tenth MixTape served on a Monday for you all to enjoy. I hope folks are partaking of this nonsense, but even if they are not it is at the very least causing me to listen to a lot more music which is increasing my overall joy in the world. If you are tuning in late to this series you can check out the entire archive of past weeks collected in a single page:
Fantastic mix of songs, which I’m borderline too young to know who a lot of 5em where by or called but I recognise them in a really nostalgic way. How do you put your Spotify playlist into WordPress? I’ve tried a few times over the years with no luck. I’m using the block editor.
I go into the spotify client/website and do the option to copy the embed code, then I paste that into an HTML block type in wordpress. The main change I do is surround the entire thing in a center aligned paragraph tag.
Thank you for helping 😊
Hah! For the first time since you started this feature I literally don’t need to listen before I comment! I can hear every track on the mix in my head except for the Promise (of whome I’ve never even heard) and the Cyndi Lauper track, which I don’t know. I can’t believe you didn’t use Pretty in Pink for the Psychedelic Furs though!
The whole age thing is really, really weird. I was born eighteen years before you but I absolutely consider myself to be a child of the eighties and nineties, too. Those songs are the soundtrack to my young adult years and I saw most of those John Hughes movies on first release, either in the cinema or on rental from the video store where I went pretty much every weekend. I don’t think my cultural “childhood” ended until EverQuest pretty much killed it stone dead in 1999 so it lasted about forty years! And even then it came back to life somewhere around 2012-13 so now I consider myself to be in my cultural second childhood.