Summer Babe – Pavement Summer Babe – Pavement

Thirteen – Big Star Thirteen – Big Star

It is indeed time for the inaugural the WILD honey pie book review, and I could think of no better book than my personal favorite, Rolling Stone contributing editor and all around awesome music journalist Rob Sheffield’s 2007 music memoir/biography Love is a Mixtape. I love love love love love this book: I recommend it to everyone I know all of the time. And now, I’m going to tell you precisely why it’s the most amazing book ever and why you should read it. Right now.

First, let’s get something out of the way: the book does mostly talk about Sheffield’s wife Renee’s untimely death at the age of 31. However, the book functions as a bittersweet and lovely ode to a dynamic and unique woman, and uses a completely tragic event to talk about how music brings seemingly insignificant memories together to make something wonderful. And after reading this book at least 5 times, I think that Renee wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Each “chapter” of the book starts with a mixtape playlist; this playlist acts as an anchor for Sheffield to discuss all of the other events going on in his life when this mixtape was made. The use of the mixtape as a connection between moments in his life is (in my opinion) brilliant and gets better and better as the book progresses. Sheffield’s writing is lively, funny, and full of witty references to pop culture events and artists (like En Vogue and OMC) that I completely forgot about (and you probably did too). He has an incredible gift at describing the time, place, and the way you felt when you heard a great song for the first time; one of my favorite moments in the book is in the chapter How I Got That Look which talks a lot about lazy, summer days and Nirvana. In this chapter, Sheffield describes (to a T) the way you feel when you hear a song that’s like nothing youu ever heard before.

For him, this song was Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box. Sheffield says, “My favorite Nirvana song was Heart-Shaped Box. I first heard in our old Chrysler, stopped at the red light between Cherry Avenue and the train tracks, on my way to pick Renee up from work, just as the sun was setting. As soon as I picked her up, I started trying to describe the song I just heard, and what it sounded like, and then after I gave up in frustration, we looked at each other and drove straight to the record store at the Seminole Shopping Center” (pg. 127).

This description is what makes Sheffield’s writing so effective: it makes you feel like you were there, and that you know the exact feeling he’s describing. While the writing makes the music come alive, I’ll give you a tip: after my 2nd reading of the book, I started downloading the playlists at the beginning of each chapter; even though I didn’t think it was possible, the book held greater meaning for me. Bands I didn’t know about before (like Big Star, Pavement, and The Replacements) soon became big parts of my life.

All of Sheffield’s pop culture musings are dead on, and after my first read of the book, something inside me (more than my music taste) changed: I was more interested in the power of music, and when I heard a song, I thought about what it could possibly mean to someone else. Was a song that I previously hated (like maybe Creed or something) someone’s wedding song? I started piecing together all of the moments in my life and considering the music that was playing at the time. Sheffield is right, music can connect you to people, places, and different times more than anything else can. No lie, I think this book changed my life. Read it. Tell everyone you know to read it. You won’t be sorry. 5/5.