This series of CD mixes I'm making of my personal favorite releases of every year I've been alive has become more than a vanity project for me . . . well, no, it hasn't, it just has more levels of vanity than I thought it would. It's kind of like a musical life diary.

Diaries: something no one else but the writer is interested in except for, perhaps, intrusive mothers who don't understand boundaries and don't have the parenting skills to delve into their children's lives otherwise.

No one knows or cares about these mixes or the songs or what they may mean to me, no one's going to listen to them I shouldn't wonder, but personally they take me back to specific eras and conditions and environments. Curiously, even if I didn't get into the song or band until years later, just the awareness of a song I eventually liked years later still has a connection to that year. They occupy an outer periphery of what else was going on in that year for me.

Making these mixes are the years going by; re-living them in a way. Ani DiFranco put it well when she said recordings are records of events. Reviewing my life through what songs were released in each given year makes them a sort of record of my life. As I relive my life in what I play you.

Also interesting is how the songs, and sometimes how I've ordered them, can reflect the tenor of the year – mellow, optimistic, confused, introspective, etc. I always pay attention to the song order when I make a mix tape. Segues are important, as well as having some sort of emotional arc which can lead to an overall feel for a year, in these cases.

And finally, just something I notice as long as I'm geeking out, these mixes track the expansion of women in rock music in my consciousness through the years. Some women appear early on, but mostly in folk, and then through much of the 70's, the mixes are all male. Then women start appearing in the late 70's, but up until 1984 there are years with no women leads. Starting from 1985, women have a solid foothold and by the mid-90's they start occupying nearly half of the mixes.

And now the same is happening with Asian versus Western releases. Japanese songs start appearing early on, and they become regular after Shiho and Hiromi and the months I spent in Japan after college, and I think by the late 00's, these CDs consist of mostly Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese releases.