Mixtape Mondays

Mixtape Mondays: Melancholeidoscope

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Good Morning Friends! It is time once more for me to present you with a blend of music for the week ahead. For those who might be new to my blog, every Monday for the past several months I have been presenting you with a new Mixtape. Sure it is actually just a YouTube or Spotify playlist, but I assembled it in the loving manner that I used to assemble custom mixtapes for my friends. I am uncertain how long inspiration will keep this section of the blog alive, but it has done so for twenty posts thus far.

Melancholeidoscope

Lately, I have been struggling a bit with melancholy, but it isn’t like it has just been one unified feeling but more a kaleidoscope of feelings. So there you go… this one is a portmanteau of those two words. Sometimes you listen to down songs because you are down… but also you are not looking to be cheered up and are fine with staying down. This journey all started when I heard something on the radio that I had not heard in years… and started to piece together an album around that song… and then proceeded to edit it out of the mix in the first place. It is funny how the creative process works sometimes, and your original inspiration is chucked aside for something new. Essentially this album is a mixture of some of my favorite melancholy songs. Some have hope for better days, and some just wallow in that feeling and that is okay. Sometimes we have to be down, but it helps to have friends along for the journey. A song can be like an old familiar friend that you have not visited in a really long time, and it similarly is amazing how many emotions come rushing back as soon as you open that door.

Track List

  • Everybody’s Changing – Keane
  • Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls
  • A Long December – Counting Crows
  • Romeo And Juliet – The Killers
  • Someday? – Concrete Blonde
  • One – U2
  • You Don’t Know How It Feels – Tom Petty
  • Walking After You – Foo Fighters
  • Runaway Train – Soul Asylum
  • Yellow Ledbetter – Pearl Jam
  • Patience – Guns N’ Roses
  • High and Dry – Radiohead
  • Brass in Pocket – Pretenders

Listen On Spotify

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And that friend is my twentieth mix, and I gotta be honest I was not sure this series would have lasted this long. I am not sure how many more of these I have in me, but I am going to keep creating when the inspiration strikes me. Sometimes an album builds itself. For this one each time I thought of a song to add, listening to it would make me think of another song and then I simply had to cull what no longer worked. I think at one point I had almost thirty songs on the list and whittled it down to the blend that I present today. As always if you are tuning into this series late and wanting to catch up you can check out the archive below.

Mixtape Mondays: Mason and Librarian

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Good Morning Friends! I apologize for missing a Mixtape Monday last week, but I was fully in holiday mode and not caring about the world one little bit. For anyone who might be new to my blog, every Monday I post a playlist full of songs that have been lovingly crafted like one would have done with a precious blank cassette tape. I think that was part of what made Mixtapes in general so carefully crafted because, to be honest… a pack of high-quality blank cassettes was freaking expensive. Like legitimately a pack of three quality tapes was about half the price of an album… which is fine but nothing that you felt like you could squander. Anyways… nostalgia trip finished because today I craft my mixes for you in modern formats like Spotify and YouTube playlists.

Mason and Librarian

Often times the mixes I share with you have a clear theme to them… and I have to be honest this is probably not going to be one of those. There is a theme, but it is a deeply personal theme that won’t actually relate to anyone outside of my own skull case. In late high school I had two wildly different friends that lived a few houses down from each other, and as one drifted further down paths that I did not want to follow… I ended up clinging to the other. The day I crafted this mix, I was thinking about the wild juxtaposition of these two friends because really at their core they could not be more different. One grew up to follow in his father’s footsteps and became a Stone Mason, and the other followed his childhood passions and become a Librarian. I don’t really have much connection anymore to the first one, but talk at least weekly to the second one and chances are he will actually see this mix at some point when he catches up on my blog. Like it won’t make much sense, but this is an album that reminds me of the two of them more than actually relates to them.

Track List

  • True Nature – Jane’s Addiction
  • Freak Scene – Dinosaur Jr.
  • Violet – Hole
  • Misery – Soul Asylum
  • Welcome to the Fold – Filter
  • Nothing – Stabbing Westward
  • Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart – Stone Temple Pilots
  • Sabotage – Beastie Boys
  • Points of Authority – Linkin Park
  • When Worlds Collide – Powerman 5000
  • Space Lord – Monster Magnet
  • Lay Lady Lay – Ministry
  • Pets – Porno for Pyros

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With that, we close the nineteenth chapter in this Mixtape Monday series. This is one of my favorite ones to listen to because the same thoughts that lead me to choose this specific lineup are sort of now imbued in the final product, and listening makes me think about these two friends. I have a wealth of close acquaintances, but I have very few really close friends in the world that I have let down my armor in order to see me behind this facade. I am thankful some years back I reconnected with the Librarian, who is awesomely moving to my town and hopefully once the pandemic is a bit less scary we can do some real world shenanigans again. As always I hope you enjoyed this Mixtape and if you are new to the series you can find the entire series run over at the archives below.

Mixtape: Faith Funk Fish

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Good Morning Friends! I return this morning with another segment in what is shaping up to be one of my longest-running series. Each Monday I present my readers with a collection of tracks bound together into a specific Mixtape. Since I can’t actually mail out a physical tape to each of you… and it isn’t like most of you would even have a player to play it on… I create a collection of tracks and present them on YouTube and Spotify for your listening pleasure. Along with this I create some fake album art so the entire thing feels like a complete package. I loved doing this as a kid and I still enjoy doing it as an adult, and I hope you enjoy the effort.

Faith Funk Fish

This is another mix that I have been sitting on for a while now, largely because I was uncertain if it was finished. The idea was pretty straight forward and I wanted to try and figure out a way to blend Faith No More, Living Colour, Fishbone and Bad Brains into the same mix tape. The core theme here is bands that have rock sensibilities but also have a fusion of funk with heavy bass lines. Some of these skew more punkish like Bad Brains and Helmet and others skew more melodic like King’s X and School of Fish. I’ve listened through this many times at this point, slightly pruning and tweaking until we have reached the point it is in currently. There are some times when you creation needs to just be left alone to stand on its own, and I feel that is more or less the case with this mix. I hope you all enjoy it.

Track List

  • Cult of Personality – Living Colour
  • Servitude – Fishbone
  • Tip – Finger Eleven
  • Falling to Pieces – Faith No More
  • Lakini’s Juice – Live
  • Unsung – Helmet
  • Levitate – I Mother Earth
  • Clean My Wounds – Corrosion of Conformity
  • A Shogun Named Marcus – Clutch
  • Thunder Kiss ’65 – White Zombie
  • I Against I – Bad Brains
  • It’s Love – King’s X
  • 3 Strange Days – School of Fish

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen On Tidal

That brings to close the Eighteenth Mixtape in this series. As it stands I have one more left in the hopper, but I have a feeling that I am going to go on another bender of creating new mixes soon. This one is more delicate than some of the other ones I have released because it felt like it was a challenge to make it work. However I already have a few songs in my mind that didn’t fit into this one, that I will probably use to spin something new off in the near future. As always I hope you enjoyed this blend of songs and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts. If you are just now getting into this series, I keep and archive of all of the mixes so far.

Mixtape Mondays: Now That’s Nonsense

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Good Morning Friends! I have managed to make it to another week and with it comes a new mix. For those who might be new to the blog, each Monday I present my readers with a collection of tracks that I assemble into a Mixtape. Granted physical media doesn’t exactly translate to the internet terribly well, and as a result, I serve them up to you using YouTube and Spotify. Along with this mix, I create some fake album art, some of which is more creative than others… and I have to admit today’s is sort of a low effort showing. The goal is to create an album that plays nicely from start to finish and makes you maybe a bit nostalgic about making your own mixtapes. I absolutely was a kid that made them constantly and distributed them to my friends… and now do the same with you, my readers.

Now That’s Nonsense

During the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a string of infomercials advertising a mega compilation of pop music called “Now! That’s What I Call Music”. Each album compiled a number of Billboard top 200 chart songs, into a vessel of pure poppy nonsense. However, I am coming to find out that apparently, this series got its start over in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Most of the music I listen to on a regular basis likely never actually got any radio airplay other than alternative and college rock stations. However every so often there is a slice of the pop pie that interests me. This morning I assembled my own “Now” album made up of a lot of alternative adjacent songs that got significant radio play and in many cases appeared on a wide number of movie soundtracks. Basically, this is an album that proves I still regularly dip my toes into the top 40 pond from time to time.

Track List

  • Radioactive – Imagine Dragons
  • Pompeii – Bastille
  • Chandelier – Sia
  • Wake Me Up – Avicii
  • Can’t Hold Us – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis feat. Ray Dalton
  • Tightrope – Janelle Monae feat. Big Boi
  • Sail – AwolNation
  • I Love It – Dylan Summer
  • Royals – Lorde
  • Titanium – David Guetta feat. Sia
  • We Are Young – Fun feat. Janelle Monae
  • Pumped Up Kicks – Foster the People
  • Viva La Vida – Coldplay
  • Counting Stars – OneRepublic
  • The Fox – Ylvis

Listen On Spotify

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With that, we bring the seventeenth Mixtape in the series to a close. I am going to be honest, this entire process started because I really like Sail, Chandelier, and Radioactive and wanted to create a pop-themed mix around those songs. The result ended up with me digging out a large number of those guilty pleasure tracks and compiling them into something that is extremely easy to listen through. If you are brand new to this feature and want to catch up on some of my other mixes, you can check out the archive below.