Good Morning Folks! This is an exceptionally busy morning for me. I have a pretty early doctor’s appointment and will have to fight road construction to get there. So as a result, I got up quite a bit earlier than I had normally been getting up, largely so that I could roll this post out without issue. This week represents the third week in this new series of Mixtapes, and the twenty-sixth in total since beginning this series during the pandemic lockdown. If you are tuning in for the first time, Mixtapes are really important to me on a personal level. I’ve always loved the art of constructing just the right mix of music for the right mood. There are a lot of things that have inspired me to make mixtapes in the past, but I think part of this is that I mourn the art of crafting albums. There were so many musicians that I grew up listening to that fully understood the way an album flows… is more important than the individual songs on it. While I am entering my “Cancer Boy” era, I am finding it more important to do little things that allow me to stake a creative claim on the world, and this mixtape nonsense is just a small part of this.
26 – Willowy Weary Wise
These mixtapes start for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they are inspired by lived experience, other times are built around a specific song, and in the case of today’s mix, are a bit of a remix of someone else’s playlist. On February 6th, my friend Mallow shared a playlist on bsky, and given that I like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, I clicked through and gave it a bit of a listen. One of my favorite things about social media is when you find out one of your existing friends has relatively “drift compatible” musical tastes. Collectively, there is a lot of really great stuff on that list, but I was floored by how well a very specific block worked together. Namely, how Red Right Hand, Down by the Water, and Tear You Apart flowed together perfectly and set a very specific tone for the entire outing. Individually, they are all great songs, and I have been a massive fan of PJ Harvey since she was thrust into my life initially with 50Ft Queenie. So that gave me the tapestry with which to weave another mix, and I anchored that block in the middle of a fifteen-song mix designed to exploit that same sort of feeling. The mixtape itself was named in honor of Mallow herself, since I am effectively copying her homework for my own creation. I am hoping you will enjoy my own spin, and also check out her own playlist, so you can see two different takes on the same idea.
Track List
- 01 – Dead Souls – Nine Inch Nails
- 02 – Cirice – Ghost
- 03 – This Corrosion – The Sisters of Mercy
- 04 – People Are People – Depeche Mode
- 05 – Bela Lugosi’s Dead (The Hunger Mix) – Bauhaus
- 06 – The Killing Moon – Echo & The Bunnymen
- 07 – A Girl Like You – Edwyn Collins
- 08 – What’s A Girl To Do? – Bat For Lashes
- 09 – Death Don’t Have No Mercy – Delaney Davidson
- 10 – Red Right Hand – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
- 11 – Down By The Water – PJ Harvey
- 12 – Tear You Apart – She Wants Revenge
- 13 – Black Wings – Tom Waits
- 14 – Glory Box – Portishead
- 15 – Stay – Shakespears Sister
Listen To It Yourself
This represents three weeks in a row that I have released a new mixtape on Monday. I know that I will probably not be able to keep this up indefinitely, especially as my whole “Cancer Boy” journey ramps up. However, I do like that this gives me at least a small amount of creative control over my world. Similarly, I am trying to arrange a time to sit down and record with “The Librarian” and do what will honestly probably be the most revealing and personal episode of “Bel Folks Stuff” that I have ever done. I kind of love that I have given them this ominous-sounding moniker at the same time they are themselves struggling to decide their own identity going forward. I have a few nuggets of playlists floating around in my head, or at least anchor songs that I want to build around. One of the big self-imposed challenges for me is that I do not want to use the same songs that I have ever used before in a playlist, and similarly, I do not want to repeat the same musicians more than once in the same playlist. For example, this week I might have gone with the Ghost version of Stay, but went with the original to keep from violating my own self-imposed rule. These mixtapes are yet another way I am trying to declare that I still live and am still trying to be a creative human.
As always, you can see the full list of mixes over on my archives, and in many cases, I release the new mix a bit early there so it is staged and ready for Monday morning.