I found a box of tapes I made in the 80s and 90s. This one is from 1994, the year I finished my bachelor’s degree and married Lance (remember him from Mixtape #3?). I left Los Angeles and moved back to the Mojave Desert.
For this mixtape, I collected songs from our past (we’d known each other since high school and dated off and on over the years), and songs about being apart, for side A. The songs on side B were from our new life together.
Many of these were played at our wedding celebration. We were married in a courthouse, by a woman judge, while wearing jeans (not blue, though, we weren’t quite THAT casual… his were brown and mine were beige), and we immediately went to Disneyland for our honeymoon. But we held a party a few weeks later. I designed our wedding cake, which looked like a castle, and my mom made it because she was a professional cake decorator.
There’s a lot more country in this part of my life. Lance was a firefighter, so “The Fireman” was a favorite of ours. He was a great dancer, whether it was a slow love song, a twangy two-step or a fast-paced ten-step. We spent some fun evenings dancing under the stars at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown. We also spent a lot of time hiking and working at a Renaissance Faire on weekends.
Side A – “Then”
- The Celts – Enya (1987)
- Belle Reprise – Beauty and the Beast (1991)
“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere
I want it more than I can tell
And for once it might be grand
To have someone understand
I want so much more than they’ve got planned…” - Holding Out For a Hero – Bonnie Tyler (1984)
- Anvil of Crom – Conan the Barbarian (1982)
- Sailing Ships – Whitesnake (1989)
- The Flame – Cheap Trick (1988)
- Every Rose Has Its Thorn – Poison (1988)
- Unchained Melody – The Righteous Brothers (1965)
- Separate Lives – Phil Collins (1985)
- Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again – Phantom of the Opera (1986)
- What Might Have Been – Little Texas (1993)
- The Song Remembers When – Trisha Yearwood (1993)
- Something There – Beauty and the Beast (1991)
- The Search is Over – Survivor (1984)
- Broken Arrow – Rod Stewart (1991)
Side B – “Now”
- Wind Beneath My Wings – Bette Midler (1988)
- Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man – Barbra Streisand (1985)
- The Fireman – George Strait (1984)
- That Was a River – Collin Raye (1992)
- I Love the Way You Love Me – John Michael Montgomery (1992)
- Everything – Material Issue (1992)
- Passionate Kisses – Mary Chapin Carpenter (1992)
- Let it Be Me – Collin Raye (1992)
- I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) – The Proclaimers (1987)
- Two Sparrows in a Hurricane – Tanya Tucker (1992)
- Love, Me – Collin Raye (1991)
- In This Life – Collin Raye (1992)
Man, Collin Raye was doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to romantic country songs in the 1990s.
~ J.L. Hilton
Connect, support, comment or contact the author here
I wanted someone to love me the way Billy Joel did in “She’s Got a Way.” This song came out the year I was born and I don’t remember what brought it into my life 1n the ’90s. Probably heard it while hanging out with friends at a small bar in the Jolly Roger restaurant, at the Long Beach marina, where we’d go to see the cover band 
