This is Jammin’ With Josh. Each week I take a look at one of the bands that I love. Or perhaps it will be a band that I just discovered and think you should check out. Or maybe it will just be a way for me to post music videos. Honestly, no one will ever know.
The last installment of Jammin’ With Josh made me think about the early 2000s and some of the songs from that time period. I also need to point out that Stroke 9 actually liked my post on Twitter. I am as shocked as you are that Stroke 9 is still in around in some form and they actually have a Twitter account, but whatever. This week I thought I would dive into the art of burning a CD.
I had a few burnt CDs during my freshman year at Gannon. A kid on our floor was the only one with a CD burner and he was nice enough to allow me to use his computer to burn a CD. Usually I would just copy someone’s CD collection, but once we all started using Napster, the idea of making mix CDs became more of a thing. That summer I worked with my stepdad up in Albany and I used some of my money to buy a external CD burner for my laptop. I also bought a spindle of CD-Rs and decided to go to town making mixes. My laptop had a 4 GB hard drive, which at the time seemed huge, but as I started downloading music, it quickly filled up. So I would have to burn songs that onto discs. I made tons of mixes (in fact, I had a book of like 128 discs full that I left at work when I went into management…my gift to the kitchen). Once I bought a bigger computer, I ended up putting all of those songs back on my hard drive (I used to have some weird insanity about having every song possible on my computer).
Anyways, I would name these CDs certain things and even tried to be funny with what I wrote on them after awhile, but those first ones? They were called Random Mix and a number. I want to look back and try to remember all the songs that were on Random Mix #1 (I hope I can get them all). I made this CD my first week at Gannon during my sophomore year, so fall of 2000.
Stroke 9-Little Backpack
SR-71-Right Now
I already wrote enough about these two, no need to harp on them some more.
Cowboy Mouth-Easy
Fun fact: My wife loves Cowboy Mouth. I only know one other song by them, but this song was huge that summer.
Dynamite Hack-Boyz in the Hood
Damn, I still love this song.
Phish-Gin & Juice
I definitely still love this one. And to be honest, I know for a fact that the order of Random Mix #1 was Dynamite Hack then Phish.
9 Days-Absolutely (Story of a Girl)
Seriously, do some of these songs all blend together?
Deftones-Change
This song really did not fit. Funny story though, I got really drunk one time with Travis and Jason at a bar in Bellwood called Hammerjacks. It was karaoke night and they convinced me to sing something, so I picked this song. I have no clue why. The people of Bellwood thought I was insane, so at the end I just yelled “Bellwood-Antis football rules!” That got some cheers. Travis still says that to me when I see him (along with Snibble Nibble…do not ask).
Incubus-Pardon Me
I think I have mentioned before how this is one of the few songs I can sing from memory and I like to sing it in the shower.
3 Doors Down-Kryptonite
I wonder if I liked this song so much because of the title? My love for Superman trumped my good sense…
Barenaked Ladies-Pinch Me
I still make that joke “I just made you say underwear.” Who doesn’t love some BNL?
Fuel-Hemorrhage (In My Hands)
I saw Fuel twice in concert. Once at X-Fest, they were not very good, despite being the headlining act. I think they must have partied a little too hard all day, they came out pretty drunk and basically sucked. I then saw them at the Bryce Jordan Center a few months later and they put on a great show. So the moral of the story is never have high expectations for the final band at an all-day festival.
Vertical Horizon-Everything You Want
This song plays at work almost every day. The song still holds up pretty well, but to be honest, it was not my favorite off that album (Shackled is probably their best song). Also, a girl I dated at Gannon was totally convinced they were a Christian rock band and that this song was about Jesus. You can imagine how those conversations went.
I think that is all of the songs from that CD. I could be wrong though. Actually, Dustin probably still has that CD case, so he could easily settle this debate (every time I made a new mix, I would also print out a track list and cut it out to put in the book…I was slightly insane).
It is funny though, I kind of miss making mixes. I miss downloading music. One of the harder things I did recently was get rid of all of those songs. Back when I had my last desktop, I had over 10,000 songs. I would transfer them to DVD-Rs and eventually stored them in Dropbox. However, it seemed silly as time went on since I never listened to them. So, when I bought this computer, I allowed them to go away. I deleted most of them from Dropbox and the DVD-Rs were actually unreadable (they were scratched up from tons of moves, so I just tossed them). I thought it would bother me, maybe a sense of loss…but nope. It is just as easy to search for a song in Google or just listen to Pandora.
I do miss making the mixes though, especially the early ones. I would put way too much thought into it. I made a mix for when Jason, Travis, and I went to a Pirates game (had to have Radiohead-Creep…because Jason loves Radiohead, but hates that song). Or a mix for the fishing trip to Niagara Falls with Dad (had to have some John Prine, Bob Dylan, and maybe some O.A.R.). Some of the mixes though were pretty stupid. I just needed to put songs on a CD to give myself room. You would have metal songs with love ballads. It was just chaos. I suppose I could make playlists or something, but that just does not seem the same to me.
Oh well, I hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane.
