mixtapemonday

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.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (42)

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.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [50:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (33)