Lanterns (from Lanterns/Antlers 7" and Song Islands CD)
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It is now a moment shrouded in mystery and haze how this project really began and what the real first spark was. As mentioned, it was born of necessity I suppose. People were sad, they were bummed, work sucked, though it should not have, by rights. Life was hard, we were all feeling lost in our heads, in the city, distant, un-powerful, trapped in strange and awful situations, and I think I just wanted to do something to try to make us all feel united and safe and happier. I cannot now recall if I made this first mix and the second mix simultaneously or back to back, but I do know I finished them both completely before bringing them in to Bmax. I definitely remember telling a couple people I had some new mixes for work that I thought particular people were going to enjoy. I tried to include something for everyone that I knew anything about their tastes. I had no idea at the time that I was beginning what would turn out to be more of a manifesto than a mix tape series.
I had a video of this Bright Eyes song that somehow magically converted to an audiofile in my iTunes and having just come off of the very fun Bright Eyes Mix Off with Coree (see the K00: ARCHEOLOGY post) and I was sort of in love with his little intro speech: "this song is for the governor of California and the president of the United States, two men I admire a lot, for their biceps and their creepy fascist agendas, 1, 2, 666..." perfect and, like many things in life, accidentally apropos to have him invoking the state of California in the first 20 seconds of the first mix, as I would very shortly thereafter be falling in love with the city of Los Angeles. LA would become the thing I pined for and dreamed of and longed to escape to, the imaginary place/person that I imagined would save me from the horribleness of my real life. It became my fairy tale and the ghost that followed me everywhere. On any given night at Bmax, when things were at their absolute worst I would sometimes find myself saying or thinking that I would rather be sitting on the curb on the side of any street anywhere in LA rather than being wear I was and dealing with what was there. Which is probably the unconscious seed that led me to put "Get me away from here, I'm dying" as the second track. I guess I was feeling that it was a sentiment we could all rally around. I figured everyone in my immediate vicinity was feeling a similar escapist obsession, the need for a trapdoor fucking exit, for me it was LA, (then drinking and these mixes). And that thread follows directly into track three, the always inspirational Ted Leo. This song in particular, in a catalog already rife with battle cries and calls to arms, and unity sentiment is a particular high mark. I felt like this was sort of like putting my arms around the people I loved and saying OK, this sucks, but we can make it (this feeling will show up over and over again, see mix ---002[Antlers], The Mountain Goats: This Year).
I think the original ideological thread in this mix for me was about indie rock songs that felt like hip-hop or had some weird hip-hop elements to them. Keep in mind this was 2005 and the major blurring of the lines between indie rock and hip-hop culture and music was not in the full swing it is in now. This mix, more than any other, is one we put on and scratch our heads about. This is the "Witch Baby" of our mix family. It is obviously the product of my brain, that much is clear. But how it fed into the entire rest of this thing is sometimes easy to miss. This is definitely my "Piper at the gates of dawn" or "Come on, pilgrim", "Eraserhead", etc... . This is certainly a case where the very first thing someone did is totally different and isolated from all of the rest of what they produced. And, I'm not gonna lie, I have always been in love with that. It's so weird and yet so perfect. And this is mine. Everything after this falls into place, in a way, and eventually I come back around to this feeling of mix, which is actually more true to the way I used to mix before the mix project. But for a long time it made no sense to anyone. This is still the transitional step for me. The "conversion theory" from how I had always traditionally mixed to how I mixed with more of a set of people in mind. In that sense looking at Lanterns and Antlers back to back is very, very telling. It pretty much is the story of going from how I make mixes for myself and my vision to how I make mixes based on a broader idea than my own aesthetics.
This Mirah track was included specifically to make Cabrie happy. I didn't know if anyone else was into her then but I remembered Cabrie having this Mirah CD she would play all the time at work. I thought she'd appreciate this being included. It also has this weird backwards feeling to it that for me really paired with "Holiday Inn" which also feels like a sort of backwards sample and this of course bleeds right into "Lanterns" itself and it all just seems to make sense to me. Awkward beats, weird reverse effects etc...
R Kelly's epic "Trapped in the Closet" was a brand new and still somewhat unknown and infamous thing at this point in time. I thought it was insanely funny and strange. My original plan was to include chapters on mixes as they appeared on the internet. I figured a new chapter would appear and it would go onto the newest mix in this series that I was making. An early theme thread the mixes picked up, one of the first, or maybe the actual first. Alas, at the time Coree was a slightly different person (probably a lot less Zoe in her then, haha) and she HATED these songs. Every time they came on the mixes she took that moment to go outside for a smoke break. So I got sort of gun shy about it and soon abandoned that serialized plan (more on this as we go). In one particularly nice Bmax moment though I remember Chad hearing these for the first time and just like losing it behind the counter.
("I tried my best to quickly put it on VIII-BRAAATE")
"Shit talker" by, the then new side project of, David Bazan had a mildly electronic feel, again, clunky beats and whatnot, and it was certainly a sentiment I was particularly tuned to at the time. And then it's back into the the weird way my mind associates things, "Don't sweat the technique" is not only one of the greatest phrases hip-hop ever taught me but it also boasts one of the greatest bass-lines of all time, which to me was really reminiscent of the sound of "The way young lovers do" by Van Morrison. The strings in that song naturally led into what was the Mountain Goats song of that moment for many of us, Coree in particular "Dilaudid".
I have always been under the impression that "So Good" by D Child was in fact a single. A fact hotly disputed at many KINGS sessions and finally disproved by Zoe. Maybe it was just a residual feeling I had based on my first experience with the song, years before, at the Comm. Ave. haircut place (which might be gone now?). I was sitting in the chair and someone in the salon put on "The writing's on the wall" and this song came on and sounded like a new, future-ized version or radio RNB that I had never encountered before (those weird, sped-up guitar lines). At the time it seemed so strange and modern. Anyway, it was a sentiment that I could really get behind. Somehow this led to "Mr. Big Stuff" a song I guess I was just obsessed with for awhile. I've always had a soft spot for killer old RNB. Spiders did a little portion of this song on our CD (along with a lot of other little RNB interpolations throughout) and Carla fucking nailed it, with the rest of us chanting "Rudy" by The Specials over it in the back. It was the age when "mash-ups" were new and exciting and we sort of accidentally recorded a live a Capella one for our album. John and I used to change instruments and places on stage at the end of a song and then go into that live all the time.
Antics by Interpol was an okay album in general which boasted a few really killer songs. I think we were all pretty hung up on "Evil" (which was included on a pre-KINGS mix, see K00:ARCHEOLOGY) but "slow hands" was a close second I thought. (I later really found a spot in my heart for "A time to be so small")
Ted Leo again, and this time doing the Kelly Clarkson classic. This, again, was very of-the-moment. Very new at the time and I thought really showcased Ted's ability to do a song with soul and feeling and no irony, which is always very refreshing. The man is sincere and that is what I have always admired about him. This song is a perfect example, and doing the little trick of going into "Maps" was, again, very heartwarming and relevant at the time. We were all still hung up on that one. The acoustic sound of this made a good bridge into "Thugz Mansion" the Nas version, which I had just heard at the time. I thought it was neat and forward thinking to have hip-hop laid over not-hip-hop music (later realized to even greater effect by Islands). I also always thought this song was an interesting counterpoint to Jay-z's "A dream" which, likewise, featured a sampled verse by one of the the two Saints of later day hip-hop. In his case Biggie, in Nas's it was Tupac. Nice bookends guys.
Now one tragic hip-hop song deserves another (I have always been fascinated by sad rap songs, [anyone remember "Dead Homiez" by Ice Cube? seriously, tears in my eyes) and for some reason I had suddenly remembered, from years ago, skateboarding on the streets of North Dekalb all night with my friend Rex listening to The Misfits and The Dead Kennedys and all kind of random hip-hop (Digital Underground was still breaking then, and the first De la album wasn't that far behind, RUN DMC "pause" etc...). Geto Boys was just one of those things that we ate up, weird bad rap with a midget with one eye? Hell yes. I got into this song and "Mind playin tricks on me" pretty hardcore all over again. I remember INSISTING that Zoe and Coree find the videos for those two songs on Youtube as mix homework. This song is particularly hard to take. The guy drinks himself almost to death, decides to shoot his ex-gf then decides it would be even "sweeter" to get her to shoot him but she won't do it, so he beats the shit out of her and eventually threatens to throw her little baby out of a window. This culminates in her accidentally shooting his eye out, which he then bitches about!? "why you shot me in the eye? I woulda shot you in the body..." REALLY? He then goes on to describe the circumstances under which the album cover for the Geto Boyz's "We can't be stopped" (which has "mind playing tricks..." on it) was taken, in perhaps the first example of the "Mirror facing mirror" rule (more on that later). This was another one where Coree really couldn't handle it and would disappear into the Boston night air for a bit. Of course knowing that I tried to make a quick recovery following this song.
"Burn Rubber" had just, just been covered by Bright Eyes on one of the two singles that preceded the colossal double release of "Digital Ash..." and "I'm Wide Awake..." and I liked Simon Joyner from way back and felt that he had always been too unknown. So here we have a good early example of one of my favorite functions of the mixes, the chance to learn and teach. The chance to use a fun and easy format to impart information and help us all learn about things/get to know things better/hear new music that we might end up loving a lot.
I actually have no idea now, how these last two songs ended up here. I hated The Shins for a very long time, mostly based on their smug fans who always insisted on tearing down every other indie rocker in order to build up how incredible The Shins were. Much like Death Cab, it took them until a 3rd album before I'd give them any credit at all, but this song I guess was a clear standout to all of us (the fucking Garden State scene notwithstanding).
And I guess I remember hearing that Bloc Party album at the time, a little late to the hype, and just thinking it was a nice, fun listen. It was one of those albums that you'd put on and listen to and it would end and you'd just start it over (BP was then a long, long, long way off from having the connotations and significance in my life and personal inner mythology than they would years later [see APPENDICES section]). But, the thing for me then, and still is, this song just always really felt like the perfect "last song" on an album. What can possibly, logically, follow this? And yet BP insists on going on for another, like, seven songs after this. Ridiculous. I guess if they didn't take the opportunity to have this song be the most perfect closing song then I would.
And that was Lanterns.
There is an "a" version of this mix although there shouldn't be. As we go through "a", "b", etc... versions of mixes will be seen and explained. This format came about as a result of the sometimes fluctuating nature of the track lists on them. I wish more than anything that I had been cataloging the minutiae as copiously then as I am now, but, alas, many of the twists and turns mixes have taken over time are lost forever. When it's possible I make notation of changes made and when and make an archive version of the mix, so that we can always go back and see it in its different stages, see it how it once was, as originally conceived, with all its flaws and omissions. I'm just that kind of dork.
Anyway, the distinction of the first two mixes is that they are early examples of indivisible mixes, incorruptible. Mixes that sprung from my head fully and perfectly formed. Many, many later mixes went through revisions to include new friends, and many early mixes went through many versions as I was trying to learn about the people I was mixing for and what everyone liked and responded to. However, 1 and 2 have been statuesque pretty much. The one exception being here, by mistake. At some point I think I accidentally reversed the order of the Eric B. and Van Morrison tracks. One CD has one first, one has another. It was an accident, and I know it, but we have to catalog it. However, I can say for sure that the original order was Eric B first and VM next, because I'm sure the strings of "The way young lovers..." were meant to segue into the strings of "Dilaudid"
This first mix was very representative of how I had been mixing for years: all over the map, weird, disparate things that only seem to correlate to me, lots of styles of music thrown together and it would serve as a sort of farewell to this style of mixing for quite awhile (at least as far as the game mixes went, outside mixes still were what they were). What replaced that was a far more rigid and disciplined style with lots of rules and boundaries. At the beginning I was really trying to tailor them to the audience. There was a lot of trial and error, mixes would be completely rethought if they didn’t play well at work (examples will be cited as they come up). It was a learning process. There were a lot of things that were not allowed on the mixes for various reasons, most of the having to do with me only knowing so much about what everyone liked a lot.
To that end, it is notable that as early as this first mix we have the first appearances of Ted Leo, Bright Eyes, Bloc Party, hip-hop, classic RNB, modern RNB, most of which would not be heard from again on the mixes for a very, very long time (hip-hop being the exception to a certain degree, although the reason hip-hop was not featured more heavily in the first place was not because I didn’t think people would be into it, it was because having a hip-hop song come on the radio was the fastest way to get your CD turned off by Amy or MR, the owners of Bmax.)
In fact, taking a step back from this first mix, it’s actually really remarkable how few of the usual suspects of the later mixes are here. There are only faint traces of all of the classic mix standards. Other than the Microphones song and the Mountain Goats almost no one is in attendance. Sure Mirah and Simon Joyner are here but, though they are certainly classic mix items, they were still pretty minor players in the cast. Belle and Sebastian and the Shins, sure, would become more real characters but not until much later. It would not be until the second and third mixes that we’d see all the normal stuff that ended up being the real mix ingredients.
Lanterns, in that way, is still such an anomaly in the scheme of the game. It really is that thing where a band’s first album or EP is just so different from all the rest of what comes later for them (Sonic Youth, Neutral Milk Hotel, Pink Floyd, Creeper Lagoon, to name a few, The Simpsons season one perhaps). We still to this day look at each other and scratch our heads and puzzle over how on earth this thing was the first mix, how this oddity set off the long train of what we all have come to know and love like second skins.
At the time, in my iTunes, there was mixing pool playlist where I would dump all the potential song candidates and pull from. It was little and as we all learned about each other and new music it expanded (eventually all of these rules and walls would come down and the mixes would be again open to anything, what can I say? I'm a "No Limits" soldier, it was a very natural evolution over a number of years and I eventually ended up right back here where I started, come hell or full circle.) It was the existence and size of this mix pool which, for the first and second wave, really dictated how many mixes there would be. The pool would dwindle and I’d figure I was coming to the end of this project. Or it would fill up again and I’d say ok well, there needs to be a few more mixes then so I can get all these great songs in there.
At first I thought it would end with eight and I would be off to the next project. Then in prep for the Gala Event (we’ll get to all that later) it became apparent that there were going to be fifty, and they just kept coming. At the time of the gala the number was momentarily capped at 144. And at one point the number 244, I believe, was picked out based on the number of planes in the air force graveyard in Don Delillo’s “Underworld”.
Of course all of these ideas would crumble, one after another, as time went on. What can I say, I have a taste for the epic. At this point in time there is no notion that there will ever stop being new mixes.
I think it was pretty early on that we decided, however, that mix 8 would become the eternal last mix, a floating entity. No matter how many mixes end up being made in my life time mix 8 will forever be considered the “last” mix. It was, accordingly, awarded an honorary numbering system all its own. It was replaced at number 8 by the next mix in line and moved to the end with the number “Figure 8” (later renamed again “Figure 8 Plus” more on that when we get to it).
At one point (as late as the Gala Event era) there was the notion that a mix called “AUTOPSY” would be the last, last mix. Autopsy was my entry in the last mix-off that Coree and I did, which was for Elliott Smith (the mix-offs themselves being real early roots of the mix project to an extent, more in the ARCHEOLOGY section, to come).
The idea that we would listen to all 50 (at that time) mixes and end with “AUTOPSY”. It seemed appropriate since the Gala Event was the culmination of a long celebration of the “death” of Bmax (a celebration at one time known as “WHATEVER AND EVER, AMEN FEST 2005”, again more on all of this as we come to it) that we would end it with an “autopsy”.
and that is "Lanterns"
One final note. The latest collective memory of this mix comes from last week. Everyone was here for a few days for my wedding and at the end I was driving everyone to the airport, Leslie, Zoe, Coree, and we were listening to the Lanterns mix in the car, singing along with the windows down, discussing various things, it was a beautiful and amazing moment. I was reminded of a one time dream we had of taking a KINGS roadtrip, driving across the country listening to the mixes in the car. It was pretty killer,
until my car overheated.
it is 2:39 AM
this is the seance.
.
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