Remember mix tapes? Staying up all night when you were in high school, or college, putting together your hand-selected, agonized over, 99% perfect playlist of jams that was guaranteed to make that hot girl/guy notice you and realize that you were their destiny? Or at least that they should totally go to the prom with you?
 
Cueing up your CD player, or turntable, or tape-to-tape deck and sweating to get the songs in the PERFECT right order, and getting the timing between songs EXACTLY right?
 

 
And spending hours hand-drawing a psychedelic masterpiece, or finding the perfect magazine photos, to decorate the paper J-card that went inside the tape case?
 
Mix tapes! 
 
They were pretty great, right? And all those hours you spent making them, and thinking about them, and harvesting albums full of songs that you could put on those mix tapes – it was pretty awesome to be that into music, right?
 
Flash-forward to today, and…damn – can you imagine having that kind of time any more? Spend hours putting together a playlist? I don’t even have time to brush my teeth twice a day!
 
 
We’re all pretty damn busy these days…but just because we don’t have time to obsess over musical minutiae doesn’t mean that we don’t still love music, and want more of it in our lives.
 
Right? 
 
Well, I definitely feel that way, so I decided to do something about it. I figured that if I could put together a solid hour of great new music, that would be something I could enjoy listening to for months, and potentially serve as sort of a gateway drug for learning even more about some of the new artists on the list. Fun!
 
Do you think you could use an hour of great new music in your life? Yeah? 
 
OK then, without further ado, here is….Your 99% Perfect Mixtape for 2014. One-plus hours  of pure listening pleasure, for the rock’n’roll-singer/songwriter inclined. I imagine you might have heard of a couple of these artists, but I’m betting there will also be some cool discoveries here for you – there definitely were for me.
 
 

 
It’d be pretty cool to keep adding to this list, too, right?  So that anyone who’s interested can look forward to a slowly-lengthening list of excellent new music. Do you know of a band or artist who should be part of this? Drop a comment and let me know, and I’ll add them to the list!