I hadn’t made a mixtape for someone in a decade before K came along. Now I make them all the time. To be clear, these are not the canonical cassette variety but recordable CDs. I found a bunch in my desk drawer, biding their time, sure they’d be of use once more. Now there are none left.

Nowadays a mixtape—whether made for someone special or to be played in a bar or restaurant to encourage further consumption—is called a playlist. But in order to share one, the giver and taker have to be on the same platform or system. Sadly, such is not the case for K and I. She’s Spotify while I’m Apple Music. But we’ve found very labor-intensive workarounds.

As I said, I make her CDs. I don’t have a CD player anymore but do have a disc burner that attaches to my laptop. When I started, I thought I could download music from Apple and put it on disc but that’s not a nut I’ve been able to crack. The files are encoded in such a way that they won’t be burned. There’s ways to jailbreak them but that’s beyond my technical abilities for now. What I do is hook up my digital audio player—the thing one gets if they don’t use a smartphone to play music on the go—and attach it to the laptop. This device has hundreds of hours of tunes. I spend a lot of happy time scouring it for suitable material. Some of the files are not MP3s—those I upload to an app that converts them—then I rename all the songs so they’re numbered in the correct sequence, attach the burner, load the blank disc, and fill it up.

When the disc is done, I write the title of the mix with a Sharpie all over its top and set it aside. I get cardstock, paper, bits of ephemera, markers, a gluestick, and scotch tape to assemble the sleeve. Before decorating it, I feed the paper into my Smith-Corona and type out the track list. Then I improvise a cover from the gathered materials and it’s done.

The other day, K told me she’s getting a cassette deck. She intends to start making me real mixtapes. This is a serious upping of the game. I have a cassette deck but haven’t recorded a tape in thirty years. I spent this morning researching how to do so with modern equipment. I’m missing at least one necessary cord. I also have to buy blank cassettes.

I can’t wait…

Made another zine. Signed/numbered edition of 30.