Mixtape Mondays

Hey Friends! It is that time again, time for another MixTape. I have managed to do this three weeks in a row which is pretty great for me. I have this bad habit of starting a series and then just wandering away like a bored toddler. For anyone who might be tuning in for the first time to this spectacle, I missed the era of building custom mixtapes for friends. Since you are all my friends I am now building custom mixtapes for you my audience. The idea is to put a number of songs together in a way that the combination is more than any of the constituent parts. The challenge however is how to make this actually work for the digital age.

The answer to that is that I am doing this largely on Spotify and also including a YouTube Playlist as a backup. I greatly favor Spotify however because it allows me to make some nonsense custom artwork, but I guess you are going to see that anyway if you are reading this blog post. I also try and come up with a good name for the mix to sort of set the tone. Occasionally these are pretentious nonsense and others like this morning are just pretty straight forward.

Push Me Punch You

One of the things that I love is a music that has a cohesive nature but no real cohesive name. This music is referred to as punk, post-hardcore, indie rock, garage rock, alternative or just the very boring and generic “rock”. Whatever the case it is music with a slight edge but that isn’t super hard about it. This is probably the mixtape of the series that I probably listen to the most because it most represents the general state of what I want to hear in a song. I attempt to parade some b side cuts and maybe some bands doing things that you might not expect from them. This is technically the second mixtape that I created in this sequence but I wanted to try and space things out a bit since the first one also had a little bit of an edge to it.

• Bull In The Heather – Sonic Youth
• Mistaken for Strangers – The National
• Bulldog Front – Fugazi
• Somebody to Shove – Soul Asylum
• Head Injury – Soundgarden
• Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction
• Backwoods – Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relatin’ Dudes To Jazz – fIREHOSE
• Out There – Dinosaur Jr.
• Cut – The Cure
• Jessie – Paw
• Nearly Lost You – Screaming Trees
• Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants
• Hey Now – The Regrettes
• Sunday Morning Coming Down – Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

Spotify

YouTube

Tidal

I hope you enjoy it and drop me a line below with your thoughts. Also what the hell do YOU call this brand of music? I mostly just call it Punk even though it isn’t the sort of Johnny Rotten/Exploited/Safety pin as a nose ring era that the term generally evokes.

Hey Friends! It is once again time for a Mixtape Monday where I dive into some of my favorite songs and blend them together into a custom made mix just for you my friends. As a quintessential GenXer I was a producer and consumer of the artform known as the Mixtape. It was so much more than just putting a number of your favorite songs on a single tape for convenience. I dug more into the flow of a mix and how the songs blended together to produce something greater than any of the parts.

Now I am doing this same process but instead presenting it in Spotify and YouTube Playlist forms for your pleasure. I am also creating custom album art for each mixtape, which is super pretentious and nonsensical but would you expect anything else? This is the second edition of this feature so here is hoping I don’t get distracted and can keep this up!

Mellowcore Cantriping

I have to be honest, I am not entirely certain I would explain the inspiration here. Effectively I built this entire mix for the sole purpose of building up to the last song. Everything leading up to that is just there more or less to prime the pump for the optimal delivery of what is bittersweet musical perfection. There will always be mystery shrouding the death of Jeff Buckley, but Grace the album released shortly before his death is sublime and I wish we would have had enough time to get more from him. The problem is that Last Goodbye is a weird genre bending song that took a very special mix tape to do it justice. I hope that I did at that.

• What’s Up? – 4 Non Blondes
• You Wouldn’t Like Me – Tegan and Sara
• Black Gold – Soul Asylum
• The Girl Underground – Cloud Cult
• All I Want – Toad the Wet Sprocket
• First of the Gang to Die – Morrissey
• The Old Apartment – Barenaked Ladies
• It’s A Shame About Ray – The Lemonheads
• Breaking the Girl – Red Hot Chili Peppers
• High and Dry – Radiohead
• Milk – Garbage
• Possession – Sarah McLachlan
• Last Goodbye – Jeff Buckley

Spotify

Youtube Playlist

Tidal

I hope you enjoy it and drop me a line below if you did.

Good Morning Friends! I have been planning some nonsense for awhile now and today represents the first day of a new series on this blog. As a GenXer I come from the golden age of the Mixtape, and was one of those people who would create lots of them and often times hand out to friends. The thing that has been lost in the age of the single and iTunes is that there used to be an intelligence to the placement of songs on an album. There were various bands that had what I used to call a “listen through” experience, where the flow of the music would happen in just the right way to have high points and low points and provide an experience that was greater than the sum of its parts.

When I used to build mixtapes for my friends, or as an often times failed vehicle for flirtation… I attempted to apply this same sort of care to the placement of songs. The majority of my life I always had some sort of soundtrack to my activities that would be playing in the background. I would associate songs with places and people and now listening back to any of those invokes this tapestry of feelings and memories along with a very concrete sense of time and place. However for the majority of the past decade this has been absent in my life and replaced with a combination of NPR and podcasts. Very recently I have been immersing myself in music and it is like a sense that I had once lost came rushing back to me.

Along with this has come the desire to start building mixtapes once again. I’ve cobbled together a number of these and I decided that the best way to share them with you my friends… is to do a weekly column of sorts. I am notoriously bad at keeping this sort of thing going for very long, but for until I get distracted by some other shiny object… I will be posting a new mixtape every Monday morning.

Contours of Indecision

This first mix tape has more of an industrial bent. I often times gave my mixtapes pretentious names, so I figured I would start off this process with a doozy. I spent hours adding and removing songs from the list until I ended up with a balanced product that sorta fades in on a strong note and releases you on a very melancholy and reflective note. There are a lot of what I would consider rarities on this specific mix tape, or places where an artist is acting in a manner other than what we expect from them. I hope you enjoy, here is the manifest:

• Burn – The Cure
• Everything’s Ruined – Faith No More
• All Wrong – God Lives Underwater
• Eye – Smashing Pumpkins
• I’m Afraid of Americans – David Bowie and Trent Reznor
• The Witch – The Cult
• Ruiner – Nine Inch Nails
• Animal – Prick
• Down – Gravity Kills
• Army of Me – Bjork
• Trip Like I Do – Filter with Crystal Method
• Girl – Beck
• Tech Noir – Gunship

Tidal

Spotify

For those without Access to Spotify, I also have provided this in a YouTube Playlist, with the key difference being you won’t get my custom album artwork.

YouTube

I hope you all enjoy my nonsense. Drop me a line with your thoughts about this project.