Wild Pitch Wednesday - The Mixtape Project

Six seems to be my magic number.  Six is the hours of sleep I've had in the past day.  Six is also the number of hours before I'm supposed to meet up with Jay1 to do a little bit of brainstorming.

Yet, here I am writing this.

Why? For you.  Because you need something to read.  And because you're so good to me.  And because you deserve it.

That's right, it's time for Wild Pitch Wednesday.  I hope you're sitting down.  If not, you totally should be.



I guess I should start off by telling you about an aborted Wild Pitch idea.  Last year, I was looking for a grand year long project to undertake as part of my New Year's Resolution.  And for awhile this was it.

Every day I was going to listen to a different episode of This American Life, and then try to use that episode as a seed for something for me to write.  I even thought about starting a separate blog (to be called "This American" Year) where I basically reviewed every episode.

Obviously it never happened...or did it?

No, it didn't.

But my love for This American Life planted the seed for my grand year-long project for 2012; to make a different mixtape every week, using a common theme, with no artist appearing more than once per mix.

In addition to no artist appearing more than once per mix, every disc would have to have at least 60 minutes of music on it.

Now first up, I didn't know if this was even feasible.  Yeah, I've got a couple thousand cds, the music wasn't a problem.  The problem was coming up with 52 distinct themes.  Even now, after sitting down and thinking about it, I've only got 41.  I figure that once the ball gets rolling, the final 11 will just pop into my head.

But just tonight I found another hurdle, finding the songs.  I went through 160 cds, an just focusing on a handful of themes (primiarly "numbers", "food" and "colors") and it took me close to two hours.  And that's not even a tenth of my collection and that's just three themes.  Either I'm going to have to be better at focusing or I'm going to have to comb through my collection every three weeks.

This is going to be a project.

Again, this is just a Wild Pitch, so it might never come to fruition.  Ideally, Jay1'd write up reviews giving his take on the songs I selected.  But we'll see what happens.

I'll be sure to keep you posted.