High School Mix-- DELUXE VERSION

song from the summer before high school (the summer of 1993)

These are Days-- 10,000 Maniacs  

I didn't even like this song when I was first exposed to it... it was my 8th grade graduation theme song, and I never even owned it until just recently when I bought it on iTunes. For awhile, when I'd hear this song on the radio in public places or wherever, this song made me feel wistful and nostalgic, but now, almost 20 years later, listening to this song makes me think of all the things in my life now that I am "blessed and lucky" to have, and makes me focus on the positive and soothes me.

songs from my freshman year of high school-- fall semester, 1993
Plush-- Stone Temple Pilots
Low-- Cracker
Summertime Rolls-- Jane's Addiction (a guy who had a crush on me put this on a mix tape for me)

spring semester, 1994
Shine-- Collective Soul
Yellow Ledbetter-- Pearl Jam

A lot happened my freshman year of high school, and by spring semester I was changing into a different person than I had been in the fall. I guess I was growing up. Anyway, that's why there's the split. My freshman year was hands down my best year of high school.

sophomore year-- 1994-1995
West End Girls-- Pet Shop Boys
Don't You (Forget About Me)-- Simple Minds

That was the year I was the Photographic Editor of Performing Arts or something like that on the school yearbook and someone made an '80's mix that we were always playing. We were also always playing the soundtrack to Dazed and Confused, but none of those songs made it on here, mostly because I just didn't care for them. But more about the songs NOT on this mix later.

Black Hole Sun-- Soundgarden

Looking back on it, this song should've gone before the other two and represented the summer of 1994, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. That was a really bad summer, and I was never the same afterward. That's all I'm gonna say about it.

second half of junior year-- 1996
These songs are all post-breakup with my first real, long-term (for high school) boyfriend.

Wish You Were Here-- Pink Floyd (of course)
Comfortably Numb-- Pink Floyd
Our Lips Are Sealed-- The Go-Go's (I remember driving around with my girlfriends one night with this song on repeat)
Time After Time-- Cyndi Lauper

summer before my senior year-- 1996
Dancing Queen-- ABBA (I was "young and sweet, only seventeen")

"Comfortably Numb," "Time After Time," and "Dancing Queen" were all songs my best friend at the time put on mix tapes for me. The summer of 1996, she went off to be a camp counselor and when she came back I had ditched her for a girl who feigned shallowness and who was friends with most of the boys I had crushes on. I still can't believe I did that! But, that's high school.

senior year
Little Fluffy Clouds-- The Orb

Senior year was my worst year of high school. My big high school was exciting my freshman year, especially since I was coming out of a small Catholic grade school where we had to wear uniforms, but each successive year of high school got worse than the last one as I started to feel more and more like some anonymous cog in the machine I more and more felt my high school to be. I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. I desperately wanted a boyfriend or at least a best friend I was joined at the hip with, you know, a BFF. But I had never felt so alone. Looking back, it's a good thing I got used to it then...

summer after high school-- 1997

Opium For the People-- Gong
Poison Door-- Sisters of Mercy (put on a mix tape for me by my then BFF)


I was feeling better. I was going off to the Rhode Island School of Design, I had gotten myself a BFF, and things seemed better. My life had enough drama in it to match the drama in my head. At the time, that seemed like a good thing.



Okay, so here's the deal with the music that's NOT on here, like Hole, Tori Amos, REM, the Beatles, the Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth and Nirvana. A lot of the music on this playlist was put on mix tapes for me... the music I adored I went out and bought on CD. Then iTunes came along, and with that I bought some of the treasured music on the mix tapes that I'd lost or that had broken or that I wanted to have on CD, or that, like in the Stone Temple Pilots Case, I gave away the CD because I may have liked it at 14 but at the ripe old age of 15 I thought I'd outgrown it.