Love Is A Mix Tape: Life And Loss, One Song At A Time
The Sunday Age
Sunday June 17, 2007
Love Is A Mix Tape: Life And Loss, One Song At A Time
Rob SheffieldBantam, $24.95Rob Sheffield is now a Rolling Stone writer. In the early 1990s he was a US graduate student, just when the musical underground went briefly mainstream: Nirvana, etc. He fell in love with a woman who was his complete opposite. Rob was Northern, Catholic, nerdy; Renee was Southern, Baptist and extrovert. Their love of music was their personal bond. They married, but after six years Renee died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. Now Sheffield recalls their life and times together. As the title suggests, this memoir is as much about music as it is about love: play on! Each chapter begins with a listing of tracks from their personal mix tapes, songs ranging from Gospel to Abba. Sheffield quotes not only pop lyrics but poet Wallace Stephens: "The self is a cloister of remembered sounds." His youth went with the nineties, which in retrospect seems like a musical golden age. Baby boomers would say the same of the 1960s. The memoir is bittersweet and perceptive. Sheffield expected a lonely life apres Renee. He notes "it didn't turn out that way", which he finds "strange and upsetting".
© 2007 The Sunday Age