9 Years, Valentines Day and a Mixtape

Today Albert and I are celebrating our nine year (!!!) anniversary, and after nearly a decade together, we're finally making it legal. We're getting married in September and are right in the thick of wedding planning. One of the projects we've been working is the music. We're going to be going the iPod DJ route, so we've been spending a lot of time collecting all of our favourite songs onto our wedding playlist. Back in the day Albert used to make me mixtapes (well burned CDs) for my birthdays, Christmas, our anniversary, and Valentines Day. They were always filled with new songs, some I grew to love, and others not so much. All of those songs, good and bad, became part of the canon of our relationship, and every time I hear them, they remind me of him.

"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again." - High Fidelity

I found a few of them floating around the cd drawer, and pulled them out for a listen. They're all scratched up, and since I don't even have a CD drive on my laptop, I used our very dusty Netflix/Music/Youtube computer, whose CD drive faces the wall in an awkward kind of way. On the oldest one I could only play the first two tracks, after the computer sounds like it's about to die, and refuses to play track three. While I'm a bit sad that I can't listen to the rest of that mix, it's makes them a bit more ephemeral. Like faded snaps shots from the past.

Because our anniversary is two weeks before Valentines Day, we like to stay home on February 14th, and celebrate in a low key fashion. Usually we'll pick up a couple of beers, and make a fancy dinner at home. It's nice to hang out at home under a blanket, while everyone else is braving the cold, and the crowded restaurants.

While I don't think I'm going to be getting a mixtape on Valentines Day this year, I really wanted to make one for all of you. Using some of my favourite songs from our ever evolving wedding playlist, I spent the good part of an afternoon putting together this mix, making sure there was a good mix of fast and slow songs, that the transitions made sense, and it had a healthy dose of Canadian artists.

Listen here