mixtapemonday

There’s no date on this one, but from the songs I’m think late 1998 or early 1999. It began with an idea about transcendence, of losing yourself in the rush of the music—the uplift, the extension of the song form. It runs out of steam before the end, but I still like it a lot.

“Pink Elephants” is the one original composition on Mick Harvey’s two albums of Gainsbourg covers. He opens the second disc with it, positioning it as a bridge between the two records.

The Verve were a one-hit wonder here in the States, but Jesus, what a hit.

“Leave Them All Behind” is a genuine out-of-body experience. That wall of guitars! Those Who’s Next keyboards! The rhythm section, playing relentless variations on that closing one-chord vamp! That acoustic guitar breakdown! In the fall of 2000, when I got my car—my first car with a decent sound system—I brought this CD single to the dealership when we passed papers, so this was the first song I played on the stereo. I played it just last night, in fact, driving the darkened streets, and san a high harmony above the other two, and goddam it if I didn’t almost levitate—still, after all these years and all these miles.

Loz thinks there’s not enough Kula Shaker on these mixtapes, so “Hey Dude” is for him.

So I’m thinking about U2 (no surprise; for a good chunk of my twenties, I seemed incapable of thinking about much else), and how, for such a huge band—for a long time, the biggest band in the world—and with twenty-five years of great songs behind them, they’ve been so seldom covered. I’m thinking it’s because the compositional forms, the overall effect of the songs, are so of a piece with the idiosyncrasies (not to say the limitations) of the band’s musicianship, and the force of their personalities. When Luka Bloom does “Bad,” say, it just sounds wrong—no disrespect to Luka’s immense talent: it’s just that the band and their songs (especially their early songs) are simply one to a nearly insurmountable degree.

With “Love Is Blindness,” though, U2 may have finally written a genuine standard. Cassandra’s version makes a powerful case for that. I’ve also seen Daniel Lanois play this live, and his reinvention of the song is totally different, if no less radical.

Next week: Side Two, and true stories of my criminal career.

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(subtitled These Carnival Days)

Someone (okay, it was Loz) complained about the presence of Kula Shaker on this mixtape, which set me again to thinking again about the fundamental differences in the pop landscape between the UK and America that made 1990s Britpop—so epic in the scope of both conquest and backlash at home—nothing but a minor ripple here. In the States, bands like Kula Shaker and the Stone Roses are seen as footnotes, one-hit wonders, amusing but slight.

And I was thinking again about the perfect storm of culture and demography and geography that allowed this to happen. In brief:

1990s America = big country, lots of bands; localized media (radio and newspapers); one-and-a-half weekly newsstand publications devoted to pop music (Billboard is mostly read by industry professionals, and Rolling Stone is neither a true weekly nor a true music magazine); a fistful of good monthlies; no national TV shows devoted to pop.

1990s UK = smaller country, fewer bands overall; nationalized media (BBC radio, and the London papers and the Grauniad are read all over the country); at least three ubiquitous newsstand weeklies (Melody Maker R.I.P.); a double fistful of glossy monthlies; Top Of The Pops (and earlier The Old Grey Whistle Test). Add to that ubiquitous public transportation and the influence of John Peel (whose like we in the States have never seen). So the UK musical scene is smaller overall, but the apparatus surrounding it is exponentially larger. And there you have the ingredients for the rise of a musical monoculture, with an interest in self-promotion and a mighty loud voice to do it with.

The price, of course, is accelerated burnout. All those music papers have to fill the pages week in and week out. The Beast must be fed. So you get bands signed to majors who’ve never played a single gig, who reach media saturation on the strength of a couple of singles, and are already has-beens (or have broken up) by the time they release the first full-length album.

And all that remains are the songs they left behind. (Or not even that: I mean, I know who Pete Doherty is, but I’ve yet to actually hear a Libertines song, or to meet anybody who has.) And beyond that, who cares?

So, anyway: a Kula Shaker track. And not just one: all the songs on the record flow into one another, so there are snippets of the preceding and following tracks edited in there, to give me smooth fades. (That’s the voice of Sheila Chandra doing konnakol at the top, by the way.)

Jennifer Kimball was the Art Garfunkel of The Story—the non-writing, non-playing half of a folk-pop vocal duo. You’ve heard her voice in hundreds of commercials since then, but this is an early songwriting attempt from just after the group split. It’s another one from the Respond compilation.

This mix came together pretty organically from the pile of songs I had lying around. Not sure what’s up with all the ocean imagery, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out. It also seemed very important to me to put Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan right next to each other—she the next wave of acoustic pop, he the grandfather figure—and equally important to use a Dylan song that sounds both futuristic and ancient, like a scratchy blues 78 found in a time capsule and reinterpreted by an ensemble of Andromedans, some time after the Sun goes cold. And yeah, Sting (speaking of backlash): but I still get a catch in my throat when out of that litany of words, with no chorus to speak of, his voice suddenly rises to sing, “I loved you in my fashion.” Sue me.

The mix falters a bit towards the end, I’ll admit. The Natalie MacMaster song is—well, it’s amusing but slight. It’s fun to hear her sing, and she should do it more often—she handles the massed backing vocals perfectly well—but it was probably a mistake to have her speak the verses; that Cape Breton-by-way-of-Lake Wobegon accent kills any sexiness stone dead.

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Now this, my friends, this is the sound of dadrock triumphant. Blindingly tasteful, some raucous (but not too rough-hewn) moments rubbing up against the sweet production values, all of it sounding like nothing so much as a really good afternoon playlist at a really good triple-A station. And, to be fair, that’s pretty much what I was shooting for, and what I was listening to at the time. It’s a grand listen for those long morning commutes in the early spring, when you want to sing along and maybe get a little teary-eyed.

Kick off with a little film music; I discovered film composer Zbigniew Preisner at the same time that I discovered his greatest collaborator, director Krzysztof Kieslowski, with The Double Life of Veronique. The gorgeous bolero that Preisner wrote for Three Colors: Red was later used in a British Airways commercial. The soundtrack album for Red has several variations on the piece, recurring in bits and pieces; but the two versions that bookend this mixtape actually come from the soundtrack CD for Three Colors: Blue. The films are all interconnected anyway…

I first heard “Teenage FBI” on a mixtape I got from godlike peninsular genius Grant Balfour. (That mixtape is also the source for the spoken-word snippet bridging “Orphan Girl” and “Hitchin’ A Ride”: the unmistakable voice of Harry Dean Stanton, reading the opening of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I love that you can hear the ice tinkling in Harry Dean’s glass. It’s the little things.)

I once shared a stage with Faith Soloway, at an open mic at the old Kendall Café. This would’ve been twelve years ago, I think: I was workshopping songs with Andy Nagy, early on in my association with We Saw The Wolf. Faith had just moved out from Chicago and was starting to establish herself on Boston’s singer-songwriter scene. I remember I liked her a lot, and I remembered her name, and I’d always smile when I heard one of her songs on WERS’s now defunct “Coffeehouse” show. She’s doing musical theatre now. This song came from a benefit compilation of 02134 pop-folk types, and as far as I know has never been issued elsewhere. It’s a great indie-rock tune, a real standout on the comp and in Faith’s body of work, I thought.

Gillian Welch, who wrote “Orphan Girl,” is a tough nut to crack. Her Americana, like all the best Americana, has a deep heart of weirdness; its religiosity is the flipside to its nihilism—its stories of empty people fucking themselves up in an empty land. In her own solo recordings and especially her performances, she practices a relentless and self-conscious purism, a stripping-down of songs to their most basic elements. This song is a neo-primitive variant on “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” and while on one level I imagine Welch might think Emmylou’s version is unconscionably prettified, the very spaciousness (not to say spaciness) of Lanois’s production highlights the yearning of that God-shaped hole without overstatement, making the song terribly moving.

Continuing in that vein, I will myself admit that on many levels I find “Hands” to be hammy, overblown hoo-hah, but am still capable of tears on hearing the bridge—“In the end, only kindness matters”—if only because, as I grow older, I more and more believe it to be true. Morrissey would almost certainly agree with me, having said elsewhere that “It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate / It takes guts to be gentle and kind.” Penelope Houston, who started off fronting Bay Area hardcore legends The Avengers before making a series of progressively prettier and gentler solo records, might have something to say about it, too.

So you’re a fan of Mixtape Mondays—being, as is only natural, dazzled by my eclectic taste, my keen ear for pop hooks, and my stethoscopic rendering of the very pulse of the zeitgeist—and you’ve wondered to yourself: As fulfilling as this experience is, might there be a way to make it (perish the thought) even better?

No? Even if you haven’t, I have. Which is probably for the best, since I’m the one in a position to actually, y’know, do something about it. My wishlist for improving the experience looked something like this:

• Simplifying downloads. The biggie. YouSendIt has a couple of clicks built into its download process, and it’s kind of a drag. Also, its terms of service require that only registered users of YouSendIt can download huge files like mixtape mp3s. All you need is a valid e-mail address, but still—it’s kind of a drag. I considered setting up a dummy account to allow people to log in anonymously, but that seemed an invitation to abuse.
• Keeping files up longer than one week. I’ve had requests for reposts—not many, but a couple—and reuploading and such is kind of cumbersome.
• Actually being able to track usage. I have no idea how many times these things get downloaded, and I don’t feel like paying an annual fee to find out.

• Previewing. With YouSendIt, Mixtape Monday is a blind download (maybe “deaf” would be a better word). Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to listen to a bit before committing your computer to what realistically could be an hour-long download?

• A move towards an actual podcast model. And all that comes with it—centralizing all the files, automatic downloads, subscriptions, the whole nine.

Enter Podbean.

Specifically, enter http://mixtapemonday.podbean.com. Enter it into your browser. Or just click it. Bookmark it, visit it every Monday—or any other day. Or subscribe, if you’ve got iTunes or some other podcast-subscribing mojo. Plans now call for each mixtape to stay up for a few weeks, until I get some idea of how much bandwidth I’m actually using.

But what about the music this time around? Well.

Let’s play “one of these bands is not like the others.” Before actually sitting down to write this, I was thinking of this mix as being mostly a gruel of dadrock with a dollop of alt-culture wildcards (which might have been true of Side One, actually): in that context, the Tindersticks are the odd band out. Their second eponymous record was probably the hippest CD I owned at the time. And “Sleepy Song” is one of the most brilliant dynamic bait-and-switch jobs in pop. Nirvana used to get a lot of press for their quiet-then-loud-then-quiet routine, but this, this—it’s practically subliminal, then it’s knocked you out of your chair. I know it’s coming and it still makes me flinch every time.

Anyway: looking again at the track listing, we’ve got a Church/Game Theory crossover; seminal underground rockers returned; Beck, just as he was becoming the arbiter of all things cool; Victoria Williams at the peak of her alternative credibility—hell, even U2 could still get college-radio airplay in 1997, and Pop was being hailed as anti-commercial (little did we know).

No, it is dadrock godheads Dire Straits who are increasingly looking like the ringers here. I am unapologetic; I’m still a sucker for the widescreen approach to songwriting and production they perfected on Love Over Gold the album (“Telegraph Road” probably being the finest example of this, like, ever). In fact, I came to “Love Over Gold” the song by way of Bill Forsyth’s wonderful film Comfort And Joy, which used its vibraphone outro as underscore for a couple of scenes.

Whatever happened to Bill Forsyth, anyway? He hasn’t made a film since 1999; the above-linked article seems to imply that his struggle to make Being Human soured him on the industry forever. That’s a shame, if it’s true. We need him and his movies now more than ever, us grown-ups.

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Subtitled “music for a guy just turned thirty,” revisited here by a guy just turned forty.

The challenge was—and still is—to find music appropriate to my age and station; neither to go chasing after the music of The Kids like some sad auld fucker desperately insisting on his own continued relevance (not to adopt a reflexive dislike of the Top Forty, either—I quite like some of the emo-screamo canon my own girl is into—but to recognize that I am not the target audience, and that I will always be an unloved intruder on that scene), nor to retreat entirely to the safety of the familiar and admit into my domain no music made after I turned 25 (although a great deal of my musical development in the intervening years has been an investigation of older musics that I missed out on the first time around), but to keep finding music, new and old, made by and for grown-ups. (Neither will I try to create the pathetic illusion that I’m still the koolest kid in skool by attempting to mold my children’s musical tastes to conform with mine, and Neal Fucking Pollack can eat a bag of dicks.)

This collection doesn’t entirely nail the idea. Trying to find music both adult and contemporary, I kind of ended up in the marketing category “Adult Contemporary.” It’s a solidly-crafted collection of songs, but it’s weirdly self-conscious: This is the mixtape of a grown-up, goddammit. Clearly, I was trying too hard. Less so, these days; As I grow older, I grow younger.

A few notes on the songs: There are a number of errors and omissions in the atribution on the J-card. “Lay My Love” is from the album Wrong Way Up, jointly credited to Brian Eno and John Cale, and indeed, there’s as much Cale as Eno in it. I suspect I left Cale’s name off because he’s got another song on the same side, and I didn’t want to look like Johnny One-Note.

The correct title of the FFKT song is “A Blind Step Away,” as it turns out, but I have an excuse; I was dubbing from an unlabelled tape that one of D’s workmates had given us.

A bit of wink-nudge here: not just following up “Spin the Bottle” with “Blind Man’s Bluff” (ho-ho), but following up a McGarrigle track with Kirsty MacColl covering the McGarrigles. So clever, yes? Even moreso because the McGarrigle song is itself a cover—of a Loudon Wainwright song, no less, said Mr. Wainwright being ex-spouse to one of the McG sisters. The wheels, so subtly they spin, hein? (Just to extend the circle a little, here’s a Kirsty cover for you.)

Like I said: Trying a little too hard.

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