Mixtape Mondays

Mixtape Mondays: Remember the Eclipse

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. It is another Monday and as a result, it is time to bring you another Mix. For those who are new to the blog, this is a series I have been doing every Monday for the last couple of months, where I present a brand new Mixtape for your listening pleasure. As a kid, I made an awful lot of mixtapes because a good chunk of that time was in the “pre-cd hard to listen to a single track” era. The goal was to create something that was a “listen-through” or an album that I could just push play and ignore until I needed to flip it over. Granted a fair number of these tapes were designed as a way of sharing my own musical tastes with friends, but now I am sharing them with you, my readers.

Remember the Eclipse

This mix is one that I have been sitting on for a while because it has a problem, and I have not been able to remedy it. So in crafting these mixes, I have tried to apply a series of rules to them, one of them has been that no single album could have the same band twice. I have skirted this a few times by including side projects that include members of the bands already on the list, but I have attempted my best to stay true to this logic. Remember the Eclipse however has a glaring flaw in the inclusion of two different songs by The Bravery. I did not realize this flaw until I had already listened to the album several times and realized it had the ideal flow. I have been sitting on it ever since because I could not seem to figure out how to perform surgery on the playlist and strategically replace that one piece because in some ways it seemed like the ideal thing for the ideal location. So instead I am releasing this one as is, knowing that it violates my own tenets… and going to be okay with that. The name comes from a coffee house that used to exist… and for some reason popped into my head while creating this.

Track List

  • An Honest Mistake – The Bravery
  • Time to Pretend – MGMT
  • Believe – The Bravery
  • Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
  • Someday – The Strokes
  • Satellite – Guster
  • Feel It Still – Portugal, the Man
  • Crooked Teeth – Death Cab for Cutie
  • Back in Your Head – Tegan and Sara
  • 11th Dimension – Julian Casablancas
  • The Way We Get By – Spoon
  • Tongue Tied – Grouplove
  • All These Things That I’ve Done – The Killers

Listen On Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen On Tidal

There we have it friends, the sixteenth Mixtape in this series. It began with the song An Honest Mistake by The Bravery… and in the end, I guess that is fitting given that I committed my own honest mistake in creating the list. If you find yourself wanting to catch up on the other fifteen mixes in the series, check out the archive link below.

Mixtape Mondays: Major Party Foul Dude

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Good Morning Friends! It is time for yet another mix to land on yet another Monday. For those who don’t know this series, each Monday I release a new MixTape that is available in both Spotify and YouTube flavors. The idea behind it is that as a kid I was a creator of many mixtapes. I would share them with my friends and often times put a lot of thought and effort into placing songs in just the right order. My goal was trying to create something that was a “listen-through” or an album that you just put in the stereo and let play. Creating an album that could be played start to end had greater significance given that rapidly skipping tracks was just not a thing that was viable. Since I don’t make physical mixtapes anymore, I make them digitally and share them with you, my readers.

Major Party Foul Dude

This album is the soundtrack to a High School or College party that I can visualize in my head summoned from the bowels of my memory. Granted a number of these songs did not exist during my college timeframe, but there is an unmistakable brand of pop-punk that fueled similar events. In my mind’s eye, I can picture a sea of red solo cups, and maybe even a trashcan full of “cowboy Koolaid” with this playing in the background. Essentially I crafted this album out of the late 90s and early 2000s post-punk music that fueled the Warp Tour and Jackass. Granted I am placing this in a very specific time context, but I feel like this sort of music is ultimately timeless. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while because I had cranked out two albums that both included some Blink 182 on them. However that was six weeks ago, and I think plenty of time has passed in order for this to feel fresh again.

Track List

  • Swing, Swing – The All-American Rejects
  • Flagpole Sitta – Harvey Danger
  • Fat Lip – Sum 41
  • Over My Head – Lit
  • The Rock Show – Blink-182
  • The Anthem – Good Charlotte
  • The Middle – Jimmy Eat World
  • Basket Case – Green Day
  • Ocean Avenue – Yellowcard
  • Nothing Inside – Machine Gun Kelly
  • And I – Box Car Racer
  • Santa Monica – Everclear
  • Banditos – The Refreshments
  • Coolidge – Descendents
  • King of Wishful Thinking – New Found Glory

Listen on Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

There we have it friends, the fifteenth Mixtape in this series. I still have a large number of these waiting in the wings and still, find myself every few weeks going through a period of cranking out three or four of them at a time. For now, the inspiration is holding steady, so I am wondering exactly how long I can keep this going. I do realize that if I am going to keep this series going, I will need to start consuming brand new music. If this is your first mix, then I suggest checking out the archive where I keep a list of all of the past albums.

Mixtape Mondays: Aether Consumed Prayers Answered

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Good Morning Friends! It is time for another Mixtape Monday, and I am going to take a moment to sorta slide into this discussion. It is Blaugust and we are supposed to be giving some sage advice or some such as mentors. This friend is what you would call a series and it gives me some structure when it comes to planning around my blog. I know that in theory every Monday, which is one of the harder days to be motivated and post something is taken up by a fixed construct that I can count on. This also gives me the ability to plan ahead, knowing that each Monday I am going to need a Mixtape to write about. As such I tend to have these super productive days when I crank out a half dozen or so tapes and then keep them in the bank for when I need another Monday post.

The double-edged sword of having a series is that you are more or less expected to keep it going. While you have a predictable slot in your blog schedule, it also means that you have to more or less produce on a pattern. I have been super bad at actually keeping series going throughout the course of this blog, and so many of these have been abandoned by the wayside. For example, probably no one actually remembers Easing Into Eorzea, Media Consumption, Steampowered Sunday, or Storytime Saturdays but they were absolutely series that I attempted to make a thing and now looking back had a shocking number of posts under each of them. They are failed series because I didn’t plan ahead enough or work on trying to create a backlog of content to post under each of those categories. Essentially my advice to you is if you plan on doing a series, treat it as something that you are going to create content for ahead of time so that you can meet those weekly drops.

Aether Consumed Prayers Answered

It is shocking to no one who has read this blog for more than a few posts recently that I am back playing an awful lot of Final Fantasy XIV. The game itself is great, but one of the things that have always stood out is the music. I realize there are a number of you that do not listen to in-game soundtracks, and I would say at least for Final Fantasy XIV it is a critical flaw in your logic. This game spends so much effort devoted to making sure that the music is great and synchronizes down to the frame with animates. One of the places this is most clearly evidenced is the Primal fights and something like Titan for Leviathan would not be the same experience without the soundtrack and the changes that are made during the source of the fight. This morning I share with you some of my favorite big fight tracks, while not all are from Primal encounters they represent the vast majority. Unfortunately this means that the YouTube version of this playlist is going to be super spoilery and I will give it a very special warning below.

Track List

  • Fallen Angel – Masayoshi Soken
  • Spiral – Masayoshi Soken
  • Rise – Masayoshi Soken
  • Battle on the Big Bridge – Nobuo Uematsu
  • Amatsu Kaze – Masayoshi Soken
  • Unbreakable (Duality) – Masayoshi Soken
  • Under the Weight – Masayoshi Soken
  • Through the Maelstrom – Masayoshi Soken
  • Metal – Brute Justice Mode – Masayoshi Soken
  • Oblivion – Masayoshi Soken
  • Birds of Prey – Masayoshi Soken
  • Wayward Daughter – Masayoshi Soken
  • Unbending Steel – Masayoshi Soken

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Normally I embed the YouTube Playlist here, but I feel like I need to give some very special warning with this one. Unlike is normally the case, the vast majority of these videos are actually fighting spoilers and show players fighting along to the primal encounter itself. This means watching the videos could spoil not only fight mechanics but significant story beats. Please watch at your own peril and I realize this is frustrating given that up until this point I have tried to give both Spotify and YouTube equal treatment. So I will link to the playlist, but if you have not experienced these fights then I highly suggest minimizing it and letting it play in the background without actually watching the fights themselves.

Well folks that were the Fourteenth mixtape in this series, and as a result, it is clearly aligned to being music from Final Fantasy XIV. I am going, to be honest, this is entirely a happy synergy that I did not plan in the least. I have been playing a lot of the games and loving the music, and this sorta happened spontaneously. Again if you are not listening to the music while you play this game, you really should remedy that. As always if you are so inclined, you can listen to the entire Mixtape Mondays Archive:

Mixtape Mondays: Tides of War

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Good Morning Friends! I hope that you had a sincerely good weekend and that it was restful in the right ways. It is the start of a brand new week and I hope it is a most excellent one. Later this week Blaugust 2021 officially begins and I am looking forward to seeing all of the participants posting away. For those of you readers who might be finding my blog for the very first time welcome. Mixtape Mondays is a series that I have been doing each Monday for a few months now. As a kid, I loved making Mixtapes for my friends and now that I don’t really use physical media I was missing that experience. After getting heavily into Spotify, I realized just how well the Mixtape format translates, and as a result each Monday I post a new mix with new album art.

Tides of War

I think every generation goes through a period of time where they heavily engage with the music of their forebearers. For me, that time was late middle school and early high school and I am not entirely certain what triggered it. I do know that in 1990 when the massive Led Zeppelin Boxed Set was released I was already bought in and fully engaged. My personal musical explorations were largely contained to the genre then termed “Classic Rock”. It does make me wonder if that moniker is a sliding scale that changes meaning as the music ages. Does that mean that Nirvanna is now considered to be “Classic Rock”? Regardless this is also music that I deeply associate with Vietnam and post Vietnam era thanks to Hollywood choosing to populate the soundtracks of these films with large swaths of these songs. It has become a cliche that if you want to set a war film in the 70s, it needs to include the song “Fortunate Son”. The thing is I get it because that track is an absolute banger.

Track List

  • Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin
  • Paranoid – Black Sabbath
  • Dream On – Aerosmith
  • Sympathy for the Devil – The Rolling Stones
  • Behind Blue Eyes – The Who
  • Limelight – Rush
  • Radar Love – Golden Earring
  • People are Strange – The Doors
  • White Room – Cream
  • Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • You Really Got Me – The Kinks
  • Revolution – The Beatles
  • Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan
  • All Along the Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix
  • Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

Well, friends that brings to a close Mixtape number thirteen in the series. As always I would love to hear your thoughts below. If you are tuning in late to the entire series you can find the archive page linked below. I hope you have a most excellent week and if you are so inclined, check out the information about Blaugust 2021 and maybe sign up.