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🗓️ 28 October 2022
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Today’s poem is High Fidelity by Tara Betts.
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0:00.0 | I'm Italy Mom, and this is The Slowdown. |
0:18.6 | I grew up on mixed tapes, first recording songs off the radio, then sometimes recording |
0:25.2 | songs from my father's great record collection, and then from tape to tape when we got fancy |
0:31.8 | with our boomboxes. |
0:33.7 | I loved mixed tapes. |
0:36.3 | Each song took you on a journey and each transition somehow told you something intimately |
0:42.7 | about the other person. |
0:45.0 | When dating in the 90s and early 2000s, the mixed tape which became the mix CD was a language |
0:51.7 | of courtship steeped in the senses. |
0:56.0 | For my 15th birthday, my very first boyfriend made me a mixed tape with a white cover, because |
1:03.0 | yes, you had to make your own cover and write the songs out, a mixed tape was work, a labor |
1:09.5 | of love. |
1:11.5 | The mixed tape he made me was called Ada, the white album. |
1:17.1 | I always loved that. |
1:19.3 | It had a lot of lead Zeppelin on it. |
1:21.3 | R-E-M, and I wish I could find it now. |
1:24.9 | There was also a time when every guy who made me a mixed tape put the song Superman by |
1:31.4 | R-E-M in the mix. |
1:33.9 | I guess they wanted me to think they were Superman? |
1:40.0 | What I once loved about mixed tapes and what I still love about mixed tapes is that the |
1:45.7 | songs are forever linked to old flames or old friends. |
1:50.8 | Last the other day, I heard Stevie Wonder's Ebony Eyes, and I texted my friend Jennia |
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