Side A
Artist	Song
R.E.M.	Me in Honey
Lyle Lovett	Here I Am
Wilco	Forget the Flowers
Ben Folds Five	Kate
De La Soul	Eye Know
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra	Ko-Ko
Soul Coughing	Soundtrack to Mary
Paul Simon	Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
Stereolab	Cybele's Reverie
Squirrel Nut Zippers	Meant to Be
Talking Heads	Mr. Jones
The Cure	Caterpillar
Blur	To the End
Side B
Artist	Song	Buy
Wilco	Misunderstood
Blur	Beetlebum
The Beatles	All You Need Is Love
K.D. Lang	The Mind of Love
Al Green	Let's Stay Together
U2	The Unforgettable Fire
G. Love and Special Sauce	Shootin' Hoops
Igor Stravinsky	L'Histoire du Soldat [Suite]: Soldier's March
The Velvet Underground	Rock and Roll
John Coltrane	Body and Soul
Wilco	Sunken Treasure

Comment:

This mix came together through a happy accident. I happened to be smitten with a girl in the town where I was in law school — and it just so happened that she owned a cat named Daisy.

That actually comes into the story later, though. I started the tape more as a challenge to myself — I'd become a world champion at putting together mope rock tapes, and frankly, I was tired of it. So on a whim — well, call it more of a personal dare — I whipped out a 100-minute tape and gave myself two rules:fill both sides; andmake something happy.I reached for the R.E.M. first because I'd fallen into a tradition of starting mixed tapes with a song by them. I almost chose the bonus track from Green, but went with "Me in Honey" after I realized what a great segue it made into the next track — "Here I Am."

That one's mostly spoken word, and if it catches you off guard it can be rolling-on-the-floor funny. I tested it out on a roommate and had him laughing in under a minute — so I knew I'd struck pay dirt.

"Forget the Flowers" popped into my head as a natural follow-up — just droll enough to wipe out the memory of Lyle Lovett, but folksy enough to do the transition justice. That's where the daisy idea first came in, though — just out of serendipity, I started racking my brain about whether the lyrics referenced daisies. That got me to thinking about other songs that might mention daisies — thus the next two tracks. With the De La Soul you've got the D.A.I.S.Y. age connection, and the Ben Folds Five cut actualy gave the tape its title.

Segues just don't get better than the transition between "Kate" and "Eye Know." Ben Folds Five ends by setting up a chord; De La Soul kicks right in and resolves it. If you time it right, it's a moment of sheer genius.

Side Two turned more into a mediation about rock and roll, and took the music in a direction much different than I'd expected. I guess the high I'd been on had worn off by then — and aside from that, the murderer's row of tracks at the front end — a metronomic bit at the end of "Misunderstood" swings right into "Beetlebum," which has a noise freak-out at its close that makes an uncanny setup for "All You Need Is Love" — was just too potent to be denied.

I wedged "Shootin' Hoops" in partly as a goof — I worked this tape up in the middle of the NCAA tournament, and the girl I had in mind was a rabid college hoops fan. It came in handy, though, as a break from the serious mood that had started to settle in with the K.D. Lang and the U2.

And now comes the matter of the sequence at the close: Stravinsky, the Velvets, and John Coltrane. Whacked as it looks on paper, the music just works. Trust me. [For me, brilliance in a mixed tape — at least the ones I've heard — invariably comes from a willingness to drop your preconceptions and hop between genres with reckless abandon. I would put a 13th-century motet on a tape if I thought it worked.]

"Sunken Treasure" made an odd choice for a close, because the song never really resolves — the last bit of the song is just a gratuitously off-key piano chord. When taken in as a song cycle, though — which is how I'd started to look at it — the second side runs through so many emotions that just letting it drop from exhaustion makes a lot of sense. [And even if it didn't, the question was moot. I was flat out of tape.]

The rest of the story? I fell in love with the tape so hard that I never gave it to the girl I had in mind. I kid you not. Listening to it always puts me back into a great frame of mind, though, so even though the girl didn't get the tape — and I didn't get the girl — I'd say the story turned out alright.

Feedback: