mixtapemonday

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.