the odd intention aka The Mixtape Story

I was out on a first date with a girl back in the spring. We stopped in at Soundscapes record shop on College St., and I was talking about all the music I liked. She wasn't familiar with many, which was fine, as her tastes tended more to the "adult contemporary" part of the radio dial. She or I, I can't recall, suggested putting together a CD of some of songs I recommended for her. I had walked right into promising someone a mixtape on a first date.

Now, I make mixtapes all the time. I use them to promote bands I like, to turn friends on to music they may not have heard but would like. Most of the bands don't get to much commercial airplay, but deserve to be heard by a larger audiene: I'm pretty sure every mix disc I ever made has at least one Spoon song on it. So to me, this was just another music sampler disc. It wasn't planned as a mixtape:

mixtape as defined by Urban Dictionary

A homemade music compilation (usually on cassette or CD-R) that contains all your favourite tracks. Often you give such a compilation to the guy or gal of your fancy in hopes that it will help you win their heart.

There's no way that girl can say no, I made her the greatest mixtape ever!

She called on her way down for the second date and said she was looking forward to listening to the CD I promised. The honest truth was I forgot until she mentioned it in the call. I picked the songs and burned it in the 30 minutes it took her to come down. I burned about 20 songs that I liked, some cool music that may have gone unnoticed on commercial radio: some Dandy Warhols, some Feist, the mandatory Spoon song.

The songs were sort of random, nothing particularly romantic, no songs with "Love" in the title or anything like that: just good music. I wasn't trying to seduce her with a mixtape, letting her know what a sensitive guy I was, like some cheese-eating emo boy. It was only a second date after all, we were still early into the "getting to know you" stage.

We were talking on MSN Messenger during the following week and she mentioned how she loved several of the songs, and how some of them spoke to her about us.

There was an "us"??? She was reading more into it than I had ever meant; if I had meant for a disc to be a "mixtape", she would have known it.

I wasn't trying to win her heart. All I had wanted was for her to stop listening to Nickleback.