This one’s a long one…a three-taper made in late Spring 1998 in the middle of my stint at HMV Records. This was kind of a transitional time for me — purging old personal drama, starting a brand new science fiction novel and writing more songs and poems, working down in the Belfry at night, going on long road trips, learning how to get rid of all that negativity from the first half of the decade. I stopped hiding and started living again, especially now that I could once again afford to do so.

This mixtape got a lot of play in my first car — a 1992 Chevy Cavalier I’d named the Mach V, in which I’d recently had a tape deck installed — and contains a mix from two sources: the current playlist of WFNX which I’d listened to constantly to and from work, and the extreme expansion of promotional copies of cds that I’d begun to acquire at work. Some songs are alt-rock radio standards today (Flagpole Sitta, The Way) while others are loved deep cuts (Playboys, Fall On Tears), Belfry regulars (God Lives Underwater, Superdrag) and soundtrack songs (mostly from Great Expectations, which I listened to on the regular).

Out of most of the multi-tape mixes, I think this one holds up as one of the best. It’s consistent with only one or two filler tracks, and it contains quite a few of my favorite late 90s tracks.

[Only one track missing and not available on Spotify: Foo Fighters’ cover of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, placed between Goldfinger’s “This Lonely Place” and Tonic’s “If You Could Only See”.]