It’s 1990, and life sucks. There’s nothing good on TV, movies are lame, and the future looks worse; good thing you still have music. No, not your parents’ music, and not the Top 40 crap MTV crams down your throat -- music from bands with mysterious names like Joy Division, The Pixies, Depeche Mode, Jane’s Addiction … and some guys from Seattle named Nirvana.

Radio doesn’t understand. Your parents don’t either. But your friends do. That’s how you communicate with them – through music, and through a mix tape. You made a mix tape to tell everyone who you were. You made a mix tape because those songs said what you didn’t have the courage to say yourself. And in the end, that mix tape said more about you than you realized.


Mixtape (monthly from February 2012) is the story of the 90s alternative rock revolution as witnessed by high school seniors Jim, Siobhan, Terry, Lorelei and Noel. United by their shared love of music found “left of the dial,” we follow them through their many emotional travails, grappling with sex, suicide, depression, and the horrors of “real life.” Looking down the barrel of the separation that will come with graduation, they resolve to forge their bond through the music they love, but find that the friendships they thought would last forever have already begun to break apart. While everyone’s life, even theirs, has a soundtrack, that music, like the friendships it forges, has already begun to fade.