Favorite Excerpts from "Love is a Mix Tape" by Rob Sheffield

• Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece -- I had no chance.  She put a hitch in my get-along.  She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like, "What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?"  or "Why don't they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?"  Then she would fall back to sleep, while I would lie awake and give thanks for this alien creature beside whom I rested. 
• She bought too many shoes and dyed her hair red.  Her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music.
• I believe that when you're making a mix, you're making history.  You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new.  You go through an entire artist's career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs.  And then you play that one moment over and over and over.
• When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
• Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville was playing and all the girls were singing along.  Liz was asking, "Whatever happened to a boyfriend?" and I would think, "well, some of us turn into husbands, and then nobody writes songs about us except Carly Simon."

...and finally, the very last lines of the book.


What is love?

Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benetar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit "Love Is Like Oxygen" -- you get too much, you get too high, you don't get enough, and you're gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them.

But the answer is simple: Love is a mix tape.