Tonight is a nice mixture. Some Bob Dylan, Dire Straits, The Shins, South San Gabriel and Nada Surf. These were my picks tonight though (forgot to get the girls downstairs) and one of the things that was on my mind was that it is that time of year – time to get going on this year’s mix disc.  And I often start thinking about what will go on a disc by going back over what has been on mix discs that I have gotten over the years. The main people I trade mix discs with are my friends Charles and Colin, but I also have a disc or two from my friends Robert, Matt and a few people I have worked with in record stores.

South San Gabriel and Nada Surf are both bands that I got turned on to by Charles. Charles puts together a couple mix discs a year. His taste in pop music is impeccable, and over the past few years (wow – probably the last ten years to be honest) I have discovered more new good pop music from Charles’ mix discs then I have from just about any other source.

Charles and I worked together at the Tower in Berkeley in the mid ‘90s for maybe a year and a half. But I think I have stack of over 20 discs from him. If I was to also go through and count the number of discs I have bought because of tracks I’ve heard on these discs, I bet there would be another fifty or so. There is a good chance that one in ten pop discs I have are because of Charles. Probably the only people to have more influence on my CD collection Tamiko and my dad.

I don’t get to see Charles that much any more. We usually email and catch up a little a few times a year, but I think it has been two years since we last saw each other and I actually dropped mix discs I had made in his hand. Charles stopped burning his discs a couple years ago (and now posts links for downloads for his friends) that I finally picked up on last year. The funny thing is, pretty early on in this project, Celia picked up a cassette tape from Charles for her pick one night. I realized that through our friendship (over fifteen years) our mixes have gone through three formats… tapes, CDs and now mp3s. This year, as I have ripped about a fourth of my discs onto my computer, I will actually be able to transfer tracks and set up playlists to try different mixes out with. Though I will still be putting things together on the laptop, I might actually be putting together my first mix discs that won’t involve me staring at the bookshelves. I’m wondering how different it will be not digging through actual discs to find what to put on the mixes.