I love getting texts from my father. Both parents actually. (Keep them coming, Folks!) Usually, they are in the form of questions like "How do I get the music from this YouTube video I found into my iTunes library?" Other times they are passive requests like the one recreated above which I received last week. Actually the message above was the first of three rapid-fire messages he sent before I even noticed he had texted as I generally keep my iPhone and iPad silent (vibration is always turned off) if the devices are within reach. Here's our conversation, recreated verbatim:
I told him I have made High School Reunion mixes for people before and said I would like to do the same for him and Mom. He simply said OK and I told him I would make a disc, a playable CD, for both 1964 and 1965, as requested. As we'll soon see, that plan evolved as the project got under way. Here's how I made some CDs for my parents to listen to as they drove the 1,072 miles round trip to and from their 50th High School Reunion.
Ordinarily when I do High School Reunion sets, I make one disc for each year of high school with a playlist based on a song's time of peak popularity and put the songs in chronolgical order making every effort not to include Summer songs. This attention to detail would not matter much to my parents so I opted to stick close to Dad's original directive, music form 1964 and 1965. As well as 1961, 1962 and 1963 to account for their earlier high school years as Dad is just over a year older than Mom.
So rather than just rely on Billboard's national charts for each year, I looked into what their local radio stations were playing back then over at ARSA. I also asked my folks if there were any particular songs that reminded them of high school or any songs they would rather not hear. Dad said nothing came to mind and Mom replied that I knew what she liked. At this point, I have about 25 songs per year jotted down. Then I used the books pictured above to fill out the lists.
Spotify playlists of the discs, click to listen:
Similar HERC's M!Xes:
Next, I opened iTunes and began building the playlists for each disc based on the lists of songs I had compiled. Searching for the song titles gave me another idea: a bonus disc of cover versions of the songs from 1961-1965. Soon I had close to eighty minutes of music selected for 1961, 1962 and 1964 with twice that for 1963 and 1965. The bonus disc turned out to be four discs and over five hours worth of music by the time I was done. I transcoded all the songs in each of the five playlists named 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965. Then I went back and weeded through the cover versions, reducing the playlist to a mere four hours or three discs worth and burned all of those lossless files to CD-R. Well, there were a few more steps including some serious audio processing but I won't bore you with those details.
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