Mixtape Mondays

MixTape Mondays: Waiting For Now

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Hey Friends! I was torn this morning as to whether or not to keep up with MixTape Mondays or to create a more topical post returning E3 shows today. I opted to keep the series rolling forward and I guess tomorrow I will return to my crappy coverage of E3 events. For those unaware MixTape Mondays is my series where I share a playlist aka the closest thing we have to a real MixTape these days. I was one of those kids who used to create them a lot given I had the magical dual tape cassette deck stereo allowing me to record all the things. Instead of sharing them on a one by one basis, I am sharing them with all of you my readers and internet friends.

Waiting for Now

Sometimes all it really takes is a single song to send the brain off in a specific direction. I love How Soon is Now by the Smiths. There is something so iconic about the guitar vibrato and big train horn chords that I legitimately never get tired of hearing it. Because of this fact I had no clue that the song was actually over six minutes long. What ended up happening as a result was me trying to match the feel of this song occasionally skimming the top of new wave or diving down into goth classics. The end result I think “works” for reason I can’t really fully explain. This has been in my listening rotation an awful lot lately and I have technically had this one finished for almost a month before unleashing it upon the world.

  • How Soon is Now? – The Smiths
  • Whisper to a Scream – The Icicle Works
  • True Faith – New Order
  • For Her Light – Fields of Nephilim
  • Fascination Street – The Cure
  • Under the Milky Way – The Church
  • Wasteland – The Mission
  • Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division
  • Under the God – Tin Machine
  • She Sells Sanctuary – The Cult
  • Never Let Me Down Again – Depeche Mode
  • How Not To Drown – Chvrches feat. Robert Smith

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

There you have it folks, my attempt at doing “How Soon Is Now?” some justice in MixTape form. Tomorrow I fully expect to return with a post about the Microsoft and Bethesda E3 show, but for now I wanted to keep the pattern of Monday MixTape releases. I managed to make a post every single day last week and even over the weekend so I am hoping that I have finally reached a place of equilibrium with my life in spite of still going through work hell. For those new to the series there is of course always the archive allowing you to catch up on the series.

MixTape Mondays: Hack The Gibson

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Hey Friends! It is that time again, time for another mixtape. This seems to be the only thing I can actually manage to do right now on a regular schedule. Over the weekend we once again failed to record AggroChat in part because I just couldn’t handle human interaction. Work is still in a really bad state and I am not handling the chaos terribly well. The grind has been over a month long at this point and I don’t really see an end to it. During this time however, listening to music has acted as a bit of a solace to everything going on. If this is your first MixTape Monday, the idea is that I used to share mixtapes with my friends and since that is no longer terribly practical… I am doing the next best thing by creating some custom curated playlists available through Spotify or YouTube.

Hack The Gibson

I was not terribly certain what I would actually choose this morning, so I rolled a die and it chose for me. I love the movie Hackers. It is this campy vision of computer hackers that came out at exactly the right time for it to gain traction in my brain. I was a wannabe warez and script kiddie at the time… managed to gain some traction but we won’t talk about that right now. Even then I knew everything that was on the movie screen was pure nonsense… but delightful nonsense. The thing that made the movie really stand out however was the soundtrack. While there is very little overlap between my MixTape and the actual soundtrack… it is more crafted to give the same overall feeling of the movie. How do you represent something like this? With Matthew Lillard as the face of Emanuel Goldstein of course!

The challenge however is while I set out with this goal… the MixTape itself developed a life of its own.

  • From Your Mouth – God Lives Underwater
  • 6 Underground – Sneaker Pimps
  • Fools Gold – The Stone Roses
  • Block Rockin’ Beats – The Chemical Brothers
  • Purple Haze – The Cure
  • Your Woman – White Town
  • Ava Adore – The Smashing Pumpkins
  • Numb – Linkin Park
  • Voodoo People – The Prodigy
  • Human Behavior – Bjork
  • Sour Times – Portishead
  • Teardrop – Massive Attack
  • White Flag – Dido

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

This MixTape is quite a bit different from what I have generally shared, which I guess makes two weeks now in a row where I have popped out of my general traditional comfort zone. Since I now have several of these created, it is starting to get to the point where I really need to collect them all in one place. Over the weekend I did precisely that and now each time I post a new one of these I am going to close things out with a link to the archives. That way if you started this process late and you are so inclined, you can catch up and listen to the entire series.

Mixtape Mondays: Thinly Veiled Crisis

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Hey Friends! It seems that I have gone from being one of the most prolific bloggers to one of the least prolific in record time. I am still more or less trudging through hell on the work front, and as a result it has sapped any energy that I once had for creative endeavors. I miss you all greatly and this time I carved out of my life to talk to you. I need to figure out a way to return to some semblance of normality and maybe attempting to blog again is a good method to get there. The prolific era of this blog was actually spawned as a counter reaction to one of the worst periods of my life up to that point. Part of me is hoping that after I get on the far side of this current phase… I will have a similar upwelling of creative desires.

For those who are not used to this construct, the idea is simple. I create a mixtape and share it with you. For me however the act of creating a mixtape is way more than just throwing a bunch of songs together. I am old school in that nature in that I am trying to build an experience that is enjoyable to listen to in its whole. Back in the day I used to refer to albums that were built in this manner as “listen throughs” which I admit isn’t terribly creative, but they were albums I could just throw on and let play without feeling the desire to skip tracks. My goal with this project is to share with you tiny bits of myself in musical form. I was a creator of mixtapes then and I find the process more or less translates smoothly to an online playlist.

Thinly Veiled Crisis

A lot of the tracks that I have been sharing with you are fairly old at this point dating from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. With Thinly Veiled Crisis I am cherry picking from some of my favorites in modern rotation but even then there is a bit of a theme. A lot of these tracks remind me of an earlier era, namely in many cases they have this throwback flair to the “New Wave” era of the 80s. Others just sorta felt like they fit into missing pieces. I have been working on this list for a month, adding and removing songs here and there until it reached a point where I thought it was ready for listening.

  • Hard Times – Paramore
  • Once in a Lifetime – All Time Low
  • Blinding Lights – The Weeknd
  • Such Great Heights – The Postal Service
  • Oh My My – Blue October
  • Comeback Kid – Sleigh Bells
  • Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked – Cage the Elephant
  • Kiss This – The Struts
  • Deadline – Grouplove
  • Level of Concern – Twenty One Pilots
  • Serotonin – Girl in Red
  • Soul Meets Body – Death Cab for Cutie
  • Are You Bored Yet? – Wallows feat. Clairo

Listen on Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

This one is a bit different than most of what I have been sharing, but still very much represents a slice of my musical tastes. I have to admit one of my favorite parts of this experiment has been the comments I have received. Even if I can’t do other posts right now, I am hoping to keep this going because I enjoy the process greatly.

Mixtape Mondays: Flannel and Chain Wallet

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Good Morning Friends. It has been quite a long time at this point since we last spoke. My world more or less turned upside down on on the 6th of May and I still have yet to really recover from it. This is one of those work crisis sort of situations, but the longer it grinds on the more of my personal sanity it takes with it. As of this morning I will be on fifteen days without a break other than coming home and crashing before getting up and starting it all over again. During this time I have just not been taking any time to sit down and write to you all, and that means last week I missed my first Mixtape Monday in this series. It was at that point that I decided that even if I make no other posts during the week I am going to do this one because the whole act of creating and fine tuning mixtapes is important to me for reasons I can’t fully explain.

For those who are not used to this construct yet, the idea is that I create a Mixtape through Spotify and YouTube playlists and approach it like I would have approached creating a physical Mixtape or burning a physical CD for someone back in the day. Various ideas come about that incubate their way into a musical track list. If you view them collectively you can glean a lot of information about my particular musical tastes, but more likely the specific time period they were shaped by. Once upon a time I was a flannel adorned, baggy jeans wearing, chain wallet having kid that was fully enthralled by the grunge music scene. This more or less hit during late high school and early college and shaped who I thought I wanted to be. While not entirely chronologically accurate, this mixtape is somewhat of a lovesong to the way that music felt.

Flannel and Chain Wallet

Like I said above, these are not all of the songs you are going to instantly associate with the grunge era. There is no Smells like Teen Spirit on this list for example and no Even Flow, but what you do have instead are some songs that were favorites of mine that got significantly less air play. The thing for me is that the grunge feel of music continued far longer than those few years when it was in vogue. So you have The Flys which not traditionally a grunge band is drift compatible with the sound. I was listening to Primus long before I adorned my first flannel, but it still mentally gets wrapped up in this same environment for me. So again this is an interpretation of my feelings about that era of music and less an attempt at a greatest hits collection. I mean there are already plenty of those playlists out there.

  • Big Empty – Stone Temple Pilots
  • Come As You Are – Nirvana
  • Winter Song – Screaming Trees
  • Got You – The Flys
  • Backwater – Meat Puppets
  • Rearviewmirror – Pearl Jam
  • Would? – Alice in Chains
  • Jesus Built My Hotrod – Ministry
  • Jerry Was a Race Car Driver – Primus
  • Cherub Rock – Smashing Pumpkins
  • Work for Food – Dramarama
  • Low – Cracker
  • December – Collective Soul
  • Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction

Spotify

YouTube

Tidal

I hope my life settles down a bit and I can maybe just maybe return to regular blogging. In the meantime however since these posts are largely ready to go… I am going to keep doing this thing for now. That is I guess until I run out of playlists to talk about. I hope you are all doing okay out there. I am doing mostly okay but starting to be less okay as this drags on.