The Screening Room

In the movie, Michael Cera (pop culture's reigning king of awkward grace, from Arrested Development to Juno to Superbad) is Nick, a geeky-hip teen hopelessly devoted to a girl too stupid and shallow to "get" him. Still he plies her with one mix CD after another, pouring his very essence into each obsessively compiled collection. But her classmate Norah (Kat Dennings) listens to them and recognizes in their processions of great songs and obscure bands her musical soulmate. Love has taken flight before they even meet.

Mr. Cera and Ms. Dennings were in town recently, lounging through a day of interviews in a Four Seasons suite and we took a break from movie talk to compare notes on the art and science of making the perfect mix. I started by asking if they had made any themselves. Of course, being young (he's 19, she's 22) and hep to the playlist jive, they both nodded enthusiastically.

Mr. Cera started. "For long drives and stuff. And with that, he immediately went into the psycho-poetic theorizing that any devoted mix-maker has spent an indefensible amount of time contemnlating. "The pacing, the ride, the roller-coaster of it -- that's what's important, what you have to pay attention to. If you go into a low point, you've got to put something in next to pull you out of it."

Ms. Dennings quickly established her master-class level of mixology by talking about all the interstitial accents, the little custom details -- cartoon sound effects, air-traffic-controller instructions, movie and TV show snippets, etc -- that all mix-makers weave into their collections in pursuit of the Perfect Experience.

"I like to put skits in between songs on mine."

"I do, too," Mr. Cera says. "If you have the Monkeys' album, Head, there's a bunch of weird tracks on it like, 'I'll have a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it please.' And I like to put that kind of stuff on it. That's a nice bridge to your next song for a mood change."

I ask them if they are familiar with Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity. Mr. Cera immediately nods, "yeah, great book." Ms. Dennings, nods, and adds "good movie, too." I say one of the best things about the book was the way it discussed and analyzed the intricate, ineffable qualities of a great mix tape (the book was written in that mid-90s time when the making of mix cassette tapes rather than mix compact discs was still the norm).

As the movie reminds us, there is perhaps no more potentially powerful tool of seduction than the perfect mix. As Mr. Hornsby's music-mad protaginist reflects on the First Mix Tape he ever made for the Greatest Love of his LIfe, "I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter -- there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again... A go compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention... and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh, there are loads of rules."

Ms. Dennings kind of wrinkles her nose at all this talk of care and calculation and rules.

"I don't have that whole 'oh this song should lead into this song,' and 'oh, the intro to this song would be so good following this song' thing going on when I make a mix."

"I do sometimes," Mr. Cera says, unneccessarily because you just know he would. And then he goes on to talk about another way technology's advance has altered the art of mix-making.

"You know a good way to find that kind of stuff out? If you have your iPod on shuffle and you play your whole library, sometimes a song will end and go into the next one and it's just unexpectedly cool. You know, it's like 'wow, that song sounds great after that one.' It gives you combos you never would have thought of."