A couple days ago my friend Catie and I were talking about bands we listened to in high school and all the melodramatic heartbreak that comes with bands like that. Her mixtape was a 2 hour epic into the history of emo catching a lot of bands I missed.

An earlier form of this mixtape started as something I made in high school. It was a pre-emptive strike for when a crush would inevitably tell me she wasn’t interested and was inspired by a shirt Joe Strummer wore as a teen. Emblazoned on his shirt was a picture of a heart and the words “In case of emergency, tear out.” I always loved this fact because it was a slight glimpse into how sentimental the singer of The Clash could be. This is the guy who wrote The Street Parade and wrote Lost in the Supermarket for Mick Jones.

However, through switching through several computers, the original In Case of Emergency has been lost to dead hard drives and time. What remains is a new version built through someone 10 years older. I took Catie’s challenge and stuck exclusively to songs I listened to in high school. I skipped some that were on it because I didn’t know what the songs meant at the time and others have made it on several mixtapes at this point. I would say I’d be embarrassed to put any of these on a Valentine’s Day mixtape but that’d be a lie. I stand by every single one of these songs as something that got me through high school and helped me discover what love is and isn’t.