Then again: isn’t “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (#33) the premise of every Smiths song?

The material is derived from the Green Book of Songs^®, offered as a subscription service. They admit up front in their FAQ that they can’t possibly get everything:

Some songs are regarded as, frankly, too complex to full classify in this Database. For example, Emmylou Harris’s “The Pearl” covers profound themes of God and mankind that resist efforts to recognize it adequately. There are numerous other such cases, and we thank you for accepting the inevitable limitations within which this Database operates.

Which statement, modest as it is, was enough to insure their inclusion here.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and … oh, there are loads of rules.

I might actually follow these once in a while, but I don’t make a habit of it.

Or you might not:

limiting any collection to 12 or 14 or even 18 songs when you can easily fit 3-400 on a CD-R just as easily can often be viewed as a waste of time. and that’s the problem. the limitations are what lift the act of throwing some tracks together to creating a perfect and timeless mix that can resonate for decades. skeptical that a mixtape can have such a profound impact? i shit you not: books have been written on the subject. the fact is that i’ve received several mix tapes and a few mix cds and i value all of them as highly, if not higher than my favorite albums of all time.

a well-executed mix is like a book: it has an introduction, a middle, an end. it tells a story (even if that story is: here’s a cool band i like), has a rise and fall and usually has some twists and turns you don’t expect.

And how much of a story can you tell if you throw in three hundred tracks? This is Proustian overkill when you need Hemingway’s conciseness.

The art — and make no mistake about it, it is an art — of making a mix tape is one lost on a generation that only has to drag and drop to complete a mix. There’s no love or passion involved in moving digital songs from one folder to another. Those “mixes” are just playlists held prison inside an iPod. There’s no blood, sweat and tears involved in making them.

There would be albums strewn about the room. There would be painful minutes spent starting and stopping and restarting a song in an attempt to hit the record button at just the right time so as to eliminate the clunks and hisses. But even if you didn’t time it so perfectly as to not have even a millisecond of space between “Don’t Cry” and “Jamie’s Crying” it was ok. That hiss became part of the mix. Upon the third listen, that sound would no longer be a piece of imperfection, but part of the flow of the tape; the two seconds of dead air was a metaphor for the silence in your relationship.

This latter is important: we cherish the imperfections.

The Troggs’ immortal “Wild Thing,” issued by two labels in the States (Atco and Fontana) because no one was quite sure who actually owned the US rights to it at the time, contains a very noticeable board click right before the beginning of the last section. Reg Presley croons “You moooove me,” and the sound fades away: you can count your way into the next guitar blast, but before you get there, somebody hits a switch, and it’s easily audible. Admittedly, “Wild Thing” is pretty noisy on its own, but if that board click is missing, you’ll know it.

Clip from “Wild Thing” [mp3]

At least one reissue producer took pains to “clean up” that record, and he excised the board click entirely. The results were Not Good.

Still, good transitions are worth trying for. The greatest segue ever, I have believed for some time, would be from Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” into Badfinger’s “Day After Day,” and it has to be timed just right. Modern-day DJs can hit this beat without even breathing hard, but it takes a little longer for us old Luddites, even with spiffy software at our disposal.

Of course, we’ve already made an attempt at such here.

Prog Rock! Just the word makes some people nervous. Long haired nerds with lots of instruments and money, making music for themself down in some dark basement. But on the other hand, whats wrong with that picture! Prog Rock have always been the ugly stepbrother of Rock, but some of the biggest selling album in the world have been pure prog-rock. Dark Side of the Moon to just namedrop one.

They suggest six tracks, which in prog rock ought to run at least an hour total, and so they do. The closer is indeed from Pink Floyd, but not from DSOTM.

The mix of artists even on a single one of these records [is] crazy diverse, and nothing is segregated by genre. On the early albums, you will quite literally find Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Randy Newman, James Taylor, and Gordon Lightfoot sharing the same record. This defies all notions of market segmentation.

Either they were really ahead of their time, reflecting how people would eventually put all those together on their mixtapes and iPods, or they just didn’t care.

They knew. They probably didn’t anticipate the iPod and its brethren, but they knew.

If you’re not familiar with the Loss Leaders, start here.

Insight within:

The real sadness of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” comes not from the fact this guy and girl are totally done, but that this guy is so sure they’re done that he’s decided to phrase everything in negative constructions: “It ain’t no use,” indeed. But beneath the bravado, there’s hurt in him, too. The line that’s always haunted me is “You could have done better, but I don’t mind,” which sounds like precisely the sort of self-preserving rhetoric one expects from a ten-year-old who is trying to dismiss the fact that you just stole his toy. Or, you know, a twenty-two-year-old kid who’s had his heart broken.

It doesn’t change so much in one’s fifties, either.