For those of us in the right age bracket, the art of making the perfect playlist started with mixed cassette tapes—"mix tapes” we simply called them.  You went out and bought a bunch of blank cassettes, and not those crappy TDK D-ones either, it had to be Maxell.  Then you gathered a pile of vinyl records and started recording the ultimate batch of songs one at a time, whether it was a single artist and you were making your personal greatest hits, or it was a lot of different bands to create a run of songs better than any radio DJ could ever assemble.  It was so much fun, and it took hours.

When CD’s became the preferred format, the art of the mix tape, or playlist, was temporarily sidelined.  But never fear, soon enough we were all burning mixed CDR’s on our computers and the practice was revived.  Now of course, we have streaming.  Every respectable user of Spotify or Apple Music has a huge collection of playlists assembled in their music library.  And you can create one in minutes.  I am an Apple Music user and I rely on playlists far more often than simply going and playing a release from track one through the end of the record.  That fact actually makes me a little sad to be honest.  And as a side note, what also makes me really sad about the music industry today is the slow trickle of singles that are constantly being released.  I miss waiting for a new record to come out and then suddenly having ten or more new tracks to listen to all at once.  You would listen all the way through, over and over until you knew the whole record and had picked your favorites.

Anyway, no matter how it’s done, it remains a fun task to determine what will go on any given playlist.  Do you want a theme of some kind, something with a feel to it?  One band, or many bands?  One genre, or a total mix of styles?  Everybody does it differently.  I make them in all of those ways and more, it just depends on my mood.  And I have playlists ranging from 20 minutes long to more than three days!   

I called this piece “Part 1” because I wanted to share a set of playlists I recently made, and I hope that other Pencil Storm contributors will follow-up with some of their own.  For this kick-off, I am sharing five lists with a theme, and some self-imposed rules that I followed.  I have been on an 80’s hard rock binge lately, having recently seen Cinderella’s Tom Keifer and Kix at a couple of different shows. So here goes. 

These lists meet the following criteria:

1.      All bands are from the 1980’s hard-rock era (I refuse to use the term hair metal.  That term speaks to a fashion trend, not a musical genre in my opinion).

2.      Each list features five bands and five songs per band = 25 songs total. 

To summarize, these are my Mount Rushmores of 80’s metal, in groups of five bands, five songs from each and there are five lists—it’s like a 3-D playlist, 5x5x5.  Group one is probably my favorite five, but it gets murky after that and could change on any given day.  The five bands in each group are in no particular order and the songs chosen are in no particular order.  The songs themselves are not even necessarily my favorite five by the respective band, but they are near the top of the list.  

These five playlists equate to 125 (5x5x5) songs I really like.  Each list clocks in at about an hour and forty minutes (interestingly, three of the lists are exactly the same length—one hour and forty-one minutes).  The “Fab Fives” tag is corny I know, but all my playlists have weird names so that I can remember generally what’s on them as I search my long list of playlists.  The title of this piece suggests that building playlists is a science, but obviously that’s tongue-in-cheek.  It is possibly an art, it’s definitely not a science.  There’s no wrong way to do it…..

JCE, or John to his friends, was born in 1963 in the Nation’s Capital.  He grew up in the VA suburbs of D.C.  His earliest musical memories are tied to a transistor radio with a single earphone that he carried everywhere listening to AM radio. At this point he still listens to a steady diet of punk, power pop, metal (Faster Pussycat=Yes, Megadeath=No), alt country and anything that has plenty of good guitar and drums.