My junior year of college was a rough one. I fell in love, lost a scholarship, went to rehab. Yesterday, I found a mix CD I made for myself during that time, all Cat Power songs, mostly from albums I don’t own and haven’t listened to in years. Some of the songs are bootlegs, and I have no idea where I got them. But there they are, all twenty-four of them, encompassing a year that to me was earth shattering.

It’s strange to listen to them now. I think about what I knew of Cat Power at the time: she was a heroin addict, seeing her in concert was chaotic (if she showed up at all). I wasn’t even sure at the time what she looked like. All I knew was her voice and the fact that the boy I fell in love with was in love with her. And I was in love with her, too. And we listened to her music every day, while we did all kinds of drugs I wouldn’t dream of doing now.

Cat Power has become something completely different than she was back then. She kicked heroin, started showing up for gigs, won the 2007 Shortlist Music Prize. But while the critics are saying her latest album is her best, I can’t help thinking the mix tape I made of her earlier music, the songs that became the mirror to my own chaos and drug addiction, is my favorite album by far.

The music industry has been saying that iTunes, and other online music download sites, changed the face of music. Consumers don’t buy albums as whole anymore. And if they’re purchasing songs individually, why even market whole albums as a product, why not just release singles and be done with it? But the consumers know, it’s always been this way. Even before iTunes, we’ve been taking albums and cutting them up into our favorite bits, making our own albums out of the best songs and passing them around to friends. And these were our favorites, the soundtracks to our lives, the albums we played over and over (on cassette tape no less) until they broke and were gone forever.

I have a whole stack of CDs sitting next to my bed, cleaned out of the same box as the Cat Power CD, that don’t have anything written on them. And while I’m partly afraid of where in my past this rediscovery will take me, I can’t wait to hear the mix tape that will come out of it.

[Editor’s Note: Jessica Star Rocker’s column, “Cut Out The Middle Man,” brings us straight to the primary sources.]