A Gluten-Free Mix Tape

Ahh, mix tapes. I remember them well from the late 1980s and 1990s. Those of you too young to know what a mix tape is, it is this: in the days before CDs and MP3s and iTunes, we made custom compilation “albums” on cassettes. They were immortalized in John Cusack’s movie, High Fidelity, from 2000.

If you were in love, you made a mix tape for that special someone. If you had unrequited love, you made a mix tape to ease your longing, or maybe to win his or her heart. If you had just broken up, you made a broken-hearted mix tape in which to drown your sorrows, or perhaps to let that formerly-special-someone know just how badly your heart had been broken. Heck, my high school lacrosse team (Go Dalers!) even had a mix tape of psych up songs that we played before games.

I made my fair share of mix tapes. They were usually a combination of songs I’d recorded onto cassette directly off the radio, carefully sitting by the stop button to avoid capturing commercials, and songs I dubbed onto a cassette from store-bought “albums,” using a dual-cassette deck. (My first store-bought cassettes were a wild mix of classical pieces by Mozart and Beethoven and two albums by Poison. How’s that for eclectic taste in a young kid?)

I suppose the modern-day version of a mix tape would be giving someone an iPod carefully preloaded with tunes. But it’s just not the same. Today it’s too easy to just build a playlist and dump the songs onto an MP3 device. The thing about mix tapes was that they took time to make. If your tape deck didn’t have a high speed dub feature, then you were literally building the mix tape in real time, song by song, spending an hour or more sitting at your stereo, carefully planning when to switch the cassette to side B so that side A didn’t end with a half-clipped song.

As you can see, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic today. In that spirit, I’ve decided to make a gluten-free mix tape for you. It only has three songs, and each song – I hope – captures one of the three stages of universal experience upon going gluten-free:

1. A sense of loss and the challenges of living without gluten
2. Moving on
3. Feeling healthy and living a happy gluten-free life

And so, without further ado, I give you…

Hard Habit to Break, by Chicago (a breaking up love song between you and gluten)

Now being with you
Takes a lot of getting used to
Should learn to live with it
But I don’t want to
…
I’m addicted to ya babe
You’re a hard habit to break

Don’t Need U, by LeToya Luckett (moving on)

It’s time to pick my head up, baby
Learn how to be better, baby
This heartbreak ends today
…
‘Cause I’mma keep smiling, I’mma keep it moving
‘Cause I don’t need you, don’t need you

Feeling Good, by Michael Buble (the title says it all)

It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life
For me
And I’m feeling good

I hope you enjoyed the mix tape! What songs would make your list? Leave a comment and let me know!

– Pete