My PalliMed Mixtape
The Story of My Year of Training in Palliative Medicine, As Told through 15 Songs
The Mixtape. A staple of my childhood.
I loved mixtapes. I loved crafting them. I loved receiving them. I loved borrowing them and listening to them and copying them. I miss the mixtape. Every mixtape told a story.
I can still remember some of the mixtapes from my youth. There was “The Master Tape,” made by some guy friends of my sisters who were bold enough to call their creation “The Master Tape.” These guys were older, cooler, and had more access to guitar god recordings than we did in our house. Their mixtape was a glam rock masterpiece, a Harvard Classics of hair metal. Skid Row, Def Leppard, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Motley Crue, and the list goes on. I was 50% cooler after just listening to this tape. 20% cooler still after recording a copy of this tape for myself and scrawling the words “Master Tape” in felt-tip pen across the blank label.
Paradise City by Guns N' Roses
Then there was the summer camp tape. This one came to me via my older sisters, too. Earthier, more acoustic, more mid-tempo. Picture Cat Stevens, The Eagles and James Taylor playing songs with friends around a campfire, and you’ve got the vibe of the summer camp tape. To this day, the feeling I get when the second guitar comes in on the intro to Peace Train takes me right back to summer nights in the Ozarks.
I hesitate to even talk about the mixtapes we all made for young love interests. What a process that was! Do you want her to know you like her? Is giving him the tape enough, or do you need to telegraph your feelings through song selection? How do you show your feelings cleverly, but not come off too obvious?
There are, or should be, entire Masters’ theses written about how to craft the perfectly-laid-back-and-cool-but-slightly-vulnerable but not-too-romantic-but-maybe-kind-of-romantic love interest mixtape track list. I don’t think I ever mastered this art, sometimes even awkwardly adding instrumentals from movie soundtracks like Last of the Mohicans into my mixes. I was at least laid back and cool enough to never put Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” on a love interest mixtape. Looking back now, I might have had more luck in love if I’d included it.
The first mixtapes, though, and the most enduring in my memory, were my dad’s road trip mixtapes.
When I was fifteen and learning how to drive, my dad taught me two important things: 1) I must master the art of driving while eating fast food—specifically, I must handle a Jack-In-The-Box sourdough bacon cheeseburger in my right hand while steering the car solely with my left. Any struggle with this complex skill was a sign of weakness. Back in his day, you see, my dad kept his right hand around his date, used his left hand on the stick to shift gears, and steered with his knees. So I better be able to handle the burger.
And 2) All great journeys deserve a great soundtrack. To that end, my father had always made road trip mixtapes. Painstakingly recording songs from his vinyl and 8-track collection onto blank tapes, using a pieced together tower of Radio Shack technology that would make NASA’s Mission Control jealous, he turned our family roadtrips into ‘70s dadrock dreamscapes. Pablo Cruise, Steely Dan, ELO, the Doobie Brothers, Chicago, and Supertramp filled our ears as we watched Middle America roll by out the back window of our station wagon.
Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra
My father’s love of music was passed on to all us kids, and during this mid-career year of training, this fellowship, I have found that music is a great way to connect with patients and families. Music has also helped me in processing this unusual career transition.
Palliative medicine is a very different field of healthcare than the emergency medicine I had been practicing. In palliative medicine, we focus on not on curing disease and saving lives, but on treating symptoms and improving quality of life for our patients with illnesses that can’t be cured.
As if to make my father proud, my epic journey from emergency medicine into palliative medicine has featured a wonderful soundtrack. Some of these songs I shared with patients, some they shared with me, some I listened to on my own. All along the way, I have been collecting and sorting the songs that I would put on a metaphorical PalliMed mixtape.
Unlike a modern digital playlist, which can go on forever—(I recently made a playlist of 97 U2 songs I like…that’s a bit excessive, I know)—a mixtape has limited space. The aforementioned “Master Tape,” in fact, only had 12 songs on it. My PalliMed playlist could go on and on, but that would be too easy. One of my new most important roles in palliative medicine is to help people make tough choices about life-altering treatments, after all, so I better be able to make a few tough choices about what songs help tell my story.
After much careful deliberation, then, instead of a rambling PalliMed playlist, I offer to you, My PalliMed Mixtape. It’s the story of my fellowship year, told in 15 songs. Each song represents one aspect or a moment from this year of transition. I’ll share one song every few days over the next several weeks days. Some will be super quick, some a little longer. As a point of clarification, in the stories, when you see a line set apart and in italics, you are reading song lyrics.
Feel free to get a jumpstart on the music by clicking below. The music in my essays will work best for Spotify premium subscribers, but I'll supply the Apple Music links too.
My PalliMed Playlist on Apple Music
So now I ask you, my Crash Cart Campfire friends…
What mixtapes do you remember from your childhood?
What’s on your mixtape? What’s a song that would definitely be on the mixtape of your life right now?
My PalliMed Mixtape Track List (the links to the stories will go live as I publish each story)
Side 1
Side 2
Related Article: The AI Went Down to Georgia —the harrowing tale of my duel with ChatGPT for mixtape superiority
During Covid I created a Quarantine Metal Run ("mixtape" playlist on Apple) for running. The selected track titles were perfectly themed for living through a plague, during a lockdown, in a surveillance state:
Creeping Death (Metallica)
Fear of the Dark (Iron Maiden)
Seek & Destroy (Metallica)
Run to the Hills (Iron Maiden)
Fight Fire w/Fire (Metallica)
Wasted Years (Iron Maiden)
You've Got Another Thing Coming (Judas Priest)
Ride the Lightning (Metallica)
Head Like a Hole (NIN)
Sin (NIN)
The Trooper (Iron Maiden)
Battery (Metallica)
Electric Eye (Judas Priest)
Fade to Black (Metallica)
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/quarantine-metal-run/pl.u-6mo4aP3IBe0xRrX
Mixtapes....even the word is an anachronism these days. To this day, I tell my family to "tape the game" if I can't make it home in time (even though it's just a DVR). With the advent of instant-gratification-streaming its almost impossible for the younger generation (or for that matter, the generation older than us too) to fully comprehend "the work" that went into a mixtape...if you were rich you had "a dubber" (two tape decks) but most of the time I was plugging in random wires into AUX and pressing "PHONO" or "OUTPUT" to make it work....and boy was it work....especially if you were waiting to record the song on the radio! Later, with CDs, mixtapes became easier but it sort of felt like cheating. Come to think of it, the mixCD didn't take off as much as the mixtape - I believe- b/c there was respect for 'the work' that it took to make the mixtape. And yes, I made too many to count. I remember loving the more expensive black Maxell tapes with 60 mins ON EACH SIDE. I remember around 1991 asking a college "friend" (who later became my wife) to "just record the radio station KROQ in Pasadena/LA" knowing that I'd get a full tape of "new music" that I hadn't heard in Texas. KROQ was the legendary "Alternative" radio station in Pasadena/LA that spit out DJs like Richard Blade (still remember Richard Blade's flash back lunch), Adam Corolla, Dr Drew started off doing a night show on KROQ called Loveline, etc. Anyways, thats the last "mix tape" I remember.....all the cool music from the LA radio station. I remember hearing Chili Peppers, The The, Big Audio Dynamite, Pearl Jam, Oingo Boingo, Social Distortion, Depeche Mode, The Cure and Violent Femmes all on one taped recording of live radio. It was a revelation to me that all of these great bands could be on a single radio station. Only on clear days could we occasionally pick up Dallas's "The Edge" (which played "alternative" but wasn't as hip as KROQ in LA) from deep in the piney woods of East Texas.