Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Mix CDs

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite blogs, Accordions and Lace, (which I first discovered as a wedding blog, but which has now become a wonderful mix of food writing, observations on life, and thoughts on relationships and family) proposed a mix CD exchange, in which her readers signed up and she then assigned everyone a buddy for whom they'd create a mix CD, along with cover art. I thought this was a totally awesome idea, that really captured the things I love about the social networking possible on the internet and about creativity and thoughtful mail. So, I signed up and was soon sent the name of another A&L reader in Philadelphia.

At first, I had a hard time coming up with a list of songs to put on this CD--there were just too many that I loved, and I wasn't sure how to narrow them down, or how to find cohesion. But then, I noticed that several of the songs had animals in the titles or in the artists' names. So, I decided to go with the animal theme and to create a mix CD called "Menagerie," where every song or band had an animal in it. The cover art naturally flowed from there, as I depicted the menagerie present within the songs, along with little numbers matching the corresponding track.

Here are the fruits of my labor, along with the track list (click on the image to enlarge), if anyone's interested...  How many of the animals can you name without checking the track list?

3 comments:

  1. Wow! What a great idea! I hope you will post about the CD that you will later receive in the mail...

    Your cover art is really cute, too! But what would your advisor think about your representations of wildlife? It is kind of like R-E-E-L nature, no? Except it is compact-disc-nature. :)

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  2. Ha! That made me laugh (almost) aloud. Maybe I should write a book about the depictions of wildlife and "nature" in music? Harmonious Nature, it could be called?

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  3. That would be a REALLY fun dissertation project! And just imagine, you could go to conferences and give presentations where you just rock out to good music for 10 minutes...then you do a little analysis of the role of "nature" in the songs! That would be fun and I think people would really admire you for it!

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