Ok, so this was a pain in the ass.

I used to rely pretty heavily on OpenTape to stream my mixtapes to friends, but in the 7 years since the project first started OpenTape has been dead for about 3 of them. The code won’t work at all on my server and I’ve been forced to finally modernize the way these work. Oddly this coincided with the realization that this site has long been a derelict since it was hacked in 2010. All the old posts about songs and love and being dumb are now lost forever to a MySQL database I’ll never find. However, now with nothing to do, I’ve decided to relaunch it as a host for mixtapes. The inaugural mixtape will be the 2015 Valentine’s Day mixtape with as many of the others to follow as I find time to do so.

So after a couple months and scrapping an entire mixtape I finally finished my Valentine’s Day mixtape for 2015. This one is called The Department of Forgotten Songs, since the entire concept is b-sides, alternate versions and unreleased songs about your standard Valentine’s day themes: pining for someone, feeling really lonely, missing someone, loving someone, etc.

When I was a teenager, I would frantically hunt down any live songs or alternate versions of songs from artists I really liked because I am in capable of doing anything casually and quite frankly had nothing else to do. I think as a result I ended up loving these songs more than I should because they usually involved spending hours to find something that would then take at least an hour to download on my parents’ phone line resulting in a high that would last about 3 minutes.

In any case, here I’ve cut out all that work and put together a mix of songs that I always thought deserved more attention than being relegated to bonus discs, SoulSeek or EPs. As always I’m keeping the tracklist a secret since part of the fun is realizing who wrote what songs and being surprised by what comes next. However, let me know once you’ve listened to it and I’ll send you the tracklist.

Note: Your HR department might get pretty miffed if you played this on speakers at your workplace.