I think most music diehards make mixes. They’re more than just convenient arrangements of favorite songs. They’re extensions of identity, audible introductions that represent who we think are or who we hope to be. They are deeply personal, even the fun ones (especially the fun ones).

If you’re of an age you might have painstakingly recorded vinyl tracks or radio singles to a cassette tape. Being of that age, I made mixtapes for all occasions: meeting a new friend, meeting a new friend friend, random gifts, work soundtracks, exercise pacemakers, or for no reason other than fun.

Tina and I made mixtapes (and, later, mix CDs) for friends and relatives, hoping to inspire love for favorite but lesser-known bands. Well into our second decade together we thought, hey, maybe we should do this every year as a kind of Christmas ritual. Legit music press does best-of-year lists so why not us?

But how many tracks do we choose? And can we choose more than one track per album? Everyone we looked at had similar but not identical rules. Some picked 10, others 100. Some went with albums, others went with singles. With no clear model to follow we just ignored them all and jumped in, hoping it might make sense as we went along.

2004 was our first swing. Since the end result would be Christmas stocking stuffers for friends and families we needed to establish the most basic rule: eligibility. At the time, I guessed I’d need a couple of weeks to burn CDs and print inserts and labels so the list had to be done by December. Given we wanted a month or so to properly absorb a new album, we decided to make Halloween 2004 our cutoff for best-of albums. Since we were sometimes late to discover things, releases from the prior year (2003) were allowed. This netted out to around 70 albums.

Tina and I scrutinized each album, running the playlist at every opportunity. We allowed ourselves one track per artist as the hope was to build a diverse mix, showcasing as many artists as possible. Then we merged lists, finding we’d often picked the same favorite. The final count was 31: a song for each day in December. 31 Songs was born.

I spent the better part of a weekend designing the label and the jacket. 31 songs didn’t fit on one disc so I needed to build images for two CDs, plus find jewel boxes that would hold the final result. Naturally things only half-worked. Prints came out wrong or didn’t fit the box. CD burns failed for reasons that still escape me. And I had no notion how to graphically represent 31 albums. So I arranged covers on a grid and hoped for the best. I was having too many technical challenges to try some kind of fancy layout.

I don’t think either of us had any idea how long we’d keep it up. For one, people tend to lose interest in new music as they age. Second, picking the list meant listening to a lot of music, and that wasn’t always convenient. Finally, back in the days of CD-mixes, it was pretty time consuming to create physical copies with all the proper accompaniment.

But persevere we did. Year after year went by and we kept at it. Finding and listening to new music was never the hard part – we do that naturally (even if the ways we found new music have changed). CDs faded into the past, replaced by USB sticks (appropriately themed as musical instruments, fake cassette tapes, or Kiss bobble heads). We even decided to go back and build lists going back to the dawn of the 21st century.

Evolution of 31 CD covers. 2006 through 2022

Evolution of 31 USB sticks. 2014 through 2018

Later years improved graphically, too. Jacket covers took on personalities, representing things in our lives or events of the world. Beloved dogs, departed friends, elections, and tech trends all found their way into list images, long after the CD was abandoned.

The 31 list lasted far longer than we could have guessed. We just released our 25th curated best-of list (31 Songs for 2022). We figured out our rules and are dabbling in TV and movies. We brought the 31 to streaming platforms and this blog which, we hope, will share our favorite artists with an even wider audience. More than anything, it’s been fun – which is the whole point of making mixes in the first place.