Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time » (Bargain)

ROB SHEFFIELD is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He has been a rock critic and pop culture journalist for fifteen years, and has appeared on various MTV and VH1 shows. He lives in Brooklyn.


From the Hardcover edition.

In the 1990s, when "alternative" was suddenly mainstream, bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M.--bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV- were MTV. It was the decade of Kurt Cobain and Shania Twain and Taylor Dayne, a time that ended all too soon. The boundaries of American culture were exploding, and music was leading the way.

It was also when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renée, who was way too cool for him but fell in love with him anyway. They had nothing in common except that they both loved music. Music brought them together and kept them together. And it was music that would help Rob through a sudden, unfathomable loss.

In LOVE IS A MIX TAPE, Rob, now a writer for Rolling Stone, uses the songs on fifteen mix tapes to tell the story of his brief time with Renée. From Elvis to Missy Elliott, the Rolling Stones to Yo La Tengo, the songs on these tapes...

Publishers Weekly

A celebratory eulogy for life in "the decade of Nirvana," rock critic Sheffield's captivating memoir uses 22 "mix tapes" to describe his being "tangled up" in the "noisy, juicy, sparkly life" of his wife, Renee, from the time they met in 1989 to her sudden death from a pulmonary embolism in 1997. Each chapter begins with song titles from the couple's myriad mixes-"Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep"-and uses them to describe a beautiful love story: "a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl" meeting in graduate school a "hermit wolfboy, scared of life, hiding in my room with my records," and how they built a tender relationship on the music they loved, from the Meat Puppets to Hank Williams. Their bond as soul mates makes his reaction to her death deeply moving: "I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language." But Sheffield's wonderful, often hilarious and lovingly detailed stories about their early romance and their later domestic life show how they created their own personal "mix tape" of life in the same way a music mix tape "steals moments from all over the musical cosmos and splices them into a whole new groove." (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Rumblefish     1
Hey jude     16
Roller boogie     27
Tape 635     38
Love makes me do foolish things     48
Big star: for renee     55
Sheena was a man     65
Personics     71
A little down, a little duvet     77
That's entertainment     87
The comfort zone     96
Dancing with myself     108
How i got that look     118
52 girls on film     131
Crazy feeling     139
Paramount hotel     152
Mmmrob     158
Hypnotize     170
Jackie blue     180
Glossin' and flossin'     192
Blue ridge gold     201
Via vespucci     208
Acknowledgments     221