My Personal Mixtape

 

My Personal Mixtape

This past spring, in college, I took a course that studied the history of American popular music. This is the first of two assignments that I did in that class I will be posting on this blog. As my professor described it, a mixtape was a "hand-compiled set of songs that often said something about the person who compiled it and/or a specific theme". The instructions for this assignment were to create a mixtape of 3 songs that could tell someone who you were. Now a disclaimer: this list of songs is NOT the same as my top 3 favorite songs of all time. They are simply the songs that I believe would best tell someone about the type of person I am. So without further ado, here are the songs...

1. Kacey Musgraves - Rainbow

This is my favorite song of all time, a three minute long hug that’s there when I need it or a safety blanket I can retreat to when feeling overwhelmed. And it’s helped me out and elevated my spirits tremendously in my lowest moments, especially now, during a significant adversity I’m fighting. The beautiful piano melody and Kacey’s soothing voice help my anxiety melt away like butter. Almost every lyric here gets to me. Many of those lyrics serve as reminders that I’m my own person with my own unique qualities, interests, and experiences. This song would help people get to know me because it’s emblematic of why I utterly adore listening to music (arguably my biggest hobby) - it’s deeply personal to me and can resonate on a number of different emotions. But let me set the stage when this song hit the hardest for me; I was in the ICU, at the time only a few months after I had nearly lost my life from a massive hemorrhagic stroke in the summer of 2022. I felt every single emotion rush through me when I found out what happened, and I immediately thought of this song to comfort me. My parents started playing the song and then the tears started flowing like a waterfall at the ending line “it’ll all be alright” (my favorite ever lyric in a song). During such an overwhelming event when I had genuinely felt hopeless or like I’d never be able to do the simplest of things that I had taken for granted again, this was truly there for me. Beyond this just being my favorite song of all time though, I included this song in my mixtape because I truly consider it a testament to my mental strength and bravery. I am not afraid to be vulnerable when I hear this song.

2. Sia - Unstoppable

“Rainbow” wasn’t the only song that helped me out in my recovery though. And while “Rainbow” is a song that makes me want to curl up into a little ball and cry until my worries melt away and I’m ready to face my adversity again, this song is what I feel like when I’m actually confronting that adversity head on. Let me clarify though, why do I feel like this when hearing this song? In 2023, when I was in my physical rehab clinic, the PTs were making me walk fast around the halls so I could relearn walking. But I couldn't walk more than around 5 minutes without feeling excruciating pain. And I specifically remember one instance where I was breaking down crying thinking that everything was hopeless and would never get better because of how much pain I was in. The therapist working with me that day knew I loved music and he asked me to think of a song that motivated me. I, struggling to get the words out while choking on my tears, weakly said “...‘Unstoppable’ by Sia?”. From that moment on, that song became my personal anthem to belt out loud or even just in my head to overcome any challenge. When listening to this song, I feel, well, unstoppable. I know that it’s easy to see this as just another generic mid-2010s self-empowerment anthem, but very few other songs have made me feel as strong both physically and mentally in the way this did. This song is honestly emblematic of who I am as a person post-stroke - an unstoppable person that won’t let any adversity, no matter the size, get in the way of me living my life.

3. Luke Combs - Fast Car

The last song in my mixtape is a song that I call as the song that helped me find myself again. One thing about my stroke is that it left me with left-side weakness, which included my vocal chords, seriously damaging my singing voice. To anyone else, maybe it’d just be a small price to pay in exchange for having their life back. But to me, it felt like I had something incredibly therapeutic to me and my favorite part about myself just taken away from me without knowing how or why it happened. This made me basically allergic to singing and even just to listening to music at all since I hated how I sounded. But one day, I inexplicably got hooked on this song (both this cover and the original song by Tracy Chapman) and started singing it. I genuinely loved singing it, not caring about how I sounded. This is representative of why singing was and still is my favorite part of myself. I didn’t care about how I sounded before my stroke, and after my stroke, this song helped me  learn to appreciate my singing again. Singing is still a core part of my personality and I really love doing it, and this song is emblematic of why. The song itself is also incredible without all my personal significance; Luke Combs covered the song because it was one of the first songs he loved as a child, and his love for the song shines through here. He sings this like he’s extremely passionate about the song, and he clearly isn’t changing much about the composition other than playing it with more country instruments because to him, he wants to keep the magic of Tracy Chapman’s original song. Yes, it’s definitely a very faithful cover, but one that really works.

    And that's my mixtape!! Another special article based around this class that I took will be up very shortly. Until then, keep it Fire!!