Music is like a magical time machine. Just hearing an old song can transport us back to another place and time. Today’s post is a “reverse Clutter Tale”—a story of items I discarded years ago, but a little part of me wishes I’d kept them. I’m talking about my mix tape collection!

About Clutter Tales

Clutter Tales is a series where we tell the stories of our lives through our clutter. During my decluttering journey, I found a lot of things that took me back to a different place and time. Instead of casually discarding them, I decided to honour them by telling their story. I’ve written Clutter Tales about a high school shorthand textbook, an old airline ticket, a travel diary from my trip to France at age 18, notes from a visit to a fortune teller, and more!

Along with my own reflections, this series has featured posts by some of my favourite bloggers. If you’d like to write a guest post for Clutter Tales, please get in touch. I’d love to give you the opportunity to properly thank your clutter by sharing its story too!

Now, on to today’s clutter tale…

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Clutter Tale – An ode to my discarded mix tapes

Erin at Existential Ergonomics provided the inspiration for today’s Clutter Tale. Last month, she put out an amazing post with a list of 100 things her childhood self just loved. She’s a couple of decades younger than me but seeing that list sent me on a nostalgic trip back to my own childhood.

Erin ended the post by asking about our list of childhood favourites. I dropped a comment that led to this post.

A favourite Christmas gift

When I was about 10 or 11, I remember getting a portable, battery-operated, cassette recorder one Christmas. That cassette recorder is long gone, but it looked like the one in the picture below.

That gift started a long tradition of making mix tapes.

The evolution of the mix tape

My early mix tapes weren’t exactly high quality. But in the days when I had no money to buy records, these early “playlists” were the only way to listen to my favourite songs over and over!

To make a tape, I’d put the microphone next to the radio to record my favourite songs. I’m sure you can imagine all the things that could go wrong. I would get so annoyed when the phone or the doorbell would ring, or my mum would decide to run the mixer or the vacuum cleaner, right in the middle of a song. And those pesky DJs insisted on talking over the beginning and the end of songs. How inconsiderate!

Over time, my record collection grew, and I invested in a decent stereo system with a turntable and cassette deck. This took my mix tape making to a new level. I became the designated “music maker” in my group of friends—always showing up at parties with my little black attache case of “party tunes” cassettes.

Making a mix tape was a lot of work. It took the better part of a day to make one 90-minute cassette for a party. First, I’d search through my album collection agonizing over which songs to add. Then, with a list of songs and a stack of albums at the ready, it was an exercise in coordination to drop the needle on the record player with one hand and start the tape at just the right moment with the other. The struggle was real!

In those days, if a friend gave you a mix tape, you knew they must really like you a lot. You didn’t go to that much effort for just anybody.

My mix tapes are no more

With the arrival of digital music, my collection of mix tapes turned into dust collectors like the abandoned toys in the Toy Story movies. Eventually, they fell prey to my early decluttering efforts.

I don’t often suffer from decluttering regret, but a small part of me wishes I had kept those cassettes because it would be so much fun to listen to them now. I could even take an afternoon and recreate them all on Spotify. That would be amazing!

Thanks again to Erin for inspiring this story. I hope you enjoyed this installment of Clutter Tales. Please get in touch if you’d like to write a guest post for Clutter Tales. I’d love to give you the opportunity to properly thank your clutter by sharing its story too!

What songs would be on your retro mix tape? Tell me your stories below.