--003(Universe)

Universe (from the “Mount Eerie” LP)
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So, coming off those first two mixes I have this unfortunate gap in my memory about when number three got started and what exactly inspired it, probably just the good reception the first two got at work. I’m sure we were having fun and I felt like it mattered and I wanted to do it some more, wanted to see what else was out there for us. Probably feeling inspired and ready to explore other things people loved and that I loved.

This mix is sort of a landmark unto itself. I think this is sort of where the real mixology started, in earnest. This one feels like the first one where we get into the actual mix territory, the actual landscape and aesthetic that would prevail. This one also went through a few versions getting to where it is now, as we’ll see a little.

I think that, as I might have mentioned, I was sort of opening up to a lot of stuff I’d previously written off around this time, thanks to my friends. In particular, Ben Folds. I can sort of recall now sitting down with “Rockin’ the Suburbs” and really being blown away by how good it was. “Zak and Sara” was sort of my gateway drug for this album. “Fred Jones…” just jumped out at me I guess, it probably jumps out at everyone. It has that heartfelt thing that’s heard not to feel. In particular I remember Coree being pumped when this mix started, of course. I remember her telling me how excited this song had made her when she first heard it (being a big, big fan of “Cigarette”, and how she knew that it had to have a follow up song). In later years this would become a nice moment to remember Frederick Walter Shannon after we instated the “Names of Bmax People” Rule for KINGS.

Ok, so, as I said back in the day and still say to this day, while “The Glow pt.2” is for sure everyone’s favorite Microphones record, I will always insist that “Mount Eerie” is, in fact, their best. That record just completely knocked me down when it came out. But then, I’m the kind of person that finds fifteen minute songs that start with ten minutes of just foghorns and percussion to be really intriguing…

So yeah, coming off of the little binary system of “Lanterns/Antlers” I had a format (ie: naming each mix after a Microphones song which was featured on it) and the earliest run of mixes is a pretty good look at what my first favorite songs were by the Microphones (in a similar vein, I’ve been interested lately in going through and compiling the track lists of different Phil releases and seeing what number mixes all the songs end up being, for example, “Mount Eerie”: 101/031/003/100/103, not sure why I find that bit of minutiae interesting but hey, why else would I be writing this blog for myself I guess. And, to that end, I guess a similar experiment could be done with any arts or album that is mix-centric, like seeing, for example, where all the songs on Elliott Smith XO ended up and so on…).

“Universe” I mean, what can you say, its practically his emblem song (and in fact seeing scenes of him and Little Wings on tour from the “Wise Old Little Boy” DVD recently partly cemented that notion, more later). It has it all, the weird percussion, that throbbing beat, the heart of the story of Mount Eerie about Phil climbing the mountain and dying atop it and realizing he has lived it all before and before and before (“how many times have died up here before…”) the elementary school chorus, ghostly female counterpoint vocals, cameos by K Records all-stars dropped in like it’s a hip-hop song (Calvin Johnson) and, at its heart, it’s even a pop song with a hook (“do you. really. think. there’s anybody out there?”), possibly the best hook of Phil’s whole career. It was an early favorite and it’s still one of the first songs I would play for someone who knew nothing about Phil.

Again in the category of “Giving them another shot because other people believe in them so much” as I’ve previously mentioned is our friend Mike Doughty and his Soul Coughing. I remember this one from way back in New Hampshire as one of the songs that I thought had some promise (though at the time I was always caught up in how good riffs were being muddled by silly nonsensical lyrics, later in life I guess I didn’t mind it so much). In fact I distinctly remember being at my dad’s house in NH hanging out with my good friend Brendan, as I often did, and him trying to pitch SC to me, playing this song and saying something like “okay, here’s some Soul Coughing you’ll like…” Why it occurred to me around the time of this mix I can’t say. My guess is that, like Ben Folds, I was having particularly poignant moments with songs and then going back through the albums. In this case, “Ruby Vroom”.

I mean, you really can’t argue the brilliance of this bass line and the feeling that you are actually hearing something with some emotional heft. The thing about SC that has always been such a secret weapon I guess is that all the people on all the instruments are so great, any one or all of them end up carrying the songs, making them catchy. Kind of like Led Zeppelin in that way, umm… I could pretty much quote all of the lyrics to this one in a loving light, but I will refrain. I can at least say that I have always (right up to the present) been oddly moved by the line “you can take her with you…” for some reason. I remember having a discussion with Coree one day about what it means to “grip her love like a driver’s license” and she said something along the lines of “you know, with a sense of ownership” or maybe the word she used was ‘propriety’.

(Game-time decision being made right here, being that this is the first place the mix diverges into its various stages of development. I’ll go straight through the “final” version of each mix and then at the end I’ll go over the little differences from version to version)

So, here is Hefner for the first time. They make just a few appearances in the mixes and in my life in general and I don’t know why that is. But they are all very lovely cameos, much like this one. Also take the cake on one of the most thought-provoking song titles I came across that year. No idea how they ended up included, being the infrequent dark horse that they are, but there they were.

Which brings us to our first run-in with The Apples in Stereo. Elephant Six has always meant a lot to me, and a lot of people and the Apples have always seemed to me to be the de facto lead/elder statesmen of the collective. This song had a lot going for it, the hugeness of it, the horns, I’m always a sucker for a marching band feel and so on. This is another one that had a lot of appeal and validation for me when I was feeling angry and small at Newbury, bristling against the management style, and, as mentioned in previous posts, of course rang true for me and other again at Bmax. Lines like “when you go into the place where you work you have no face, don’t you wanna go the moment that you get there?” and even more so “when you go into the shop, lady watches like a hawk, she don’t like the way you look so she treats you like a crook” became eerily rallying cries for us dealing with early Amy-as-a-constant-presence-madness.

Papas Fritas, were a boston band, way back in the age of indie rock (drink one…) and this first album I thought was quite nice and I sort of recall the second one being not so great, but hey, I was probably wrong. We used to see this guy around actually when we’d drive down from NH for a show and to shop at the H Sq. Newbs for stuff we weren’t getting in Nashua. Again, no idea why I suddenly was moved to blow the dust off this. I guess I was sort of just scanning my whole listening history for very good “pop” songs. I like this one a lot because it’s so, so short and to the point, and allows for a segue, both in and out, that makes it feel like it’s almost the same song as the one before or after.

Then we have the unlikely choice for the first appearance of a mix staple, The White Stripes. More on this in the alternate versions section later but I recall this song ended up being here because it was so short and I thought it made a nice pair with that tiny PF song, probably also had just a tiny amount of space left on the mix that I wanted to fill. Lest we forget and reiterate here for history sake, until we get up a little higher, all mixes were aimed at being the length of one burned CD because this was still the dawn of computers in my life and I certainly didn’t have an iPod until later, even though by this time I think they were nearing the 3rd generation ones. So yeah, mixes had to be no longer than an hour and nineteen minutes and 45 seconds to fit on a burned disc. And really, it was perfect. It made for a very good working length for a mix (we all know about my tastes for the epic and, given the chance, I will wind something on forever and ever, and if not given the chance I will make the chance and, of course you can see that in all the boring details of my life, like the fact that though the mixes are held to a stringent length, they one day wouldn’t be quite so stringently, and, of course, after years of debate and worry it would be decided that the actual number of mixes in this series would have no end, ever).

The point being that, usually, when I mix, I’m watching the time add up and sometimes you get to the ideological end of the mix and still have a minute or a little more or less and, well, you’d like to maximize the CD length so what I usually do in those situations is click the little “Time” bar on my library so it shows songs from shortest to longest and then scan through all the songs that meet my remaining time on the CD and try to find one to include somewhere. It is, I’m sure, by this process that “Passive Manipulation” ended up where it did, and maybe even Papas Fritas.

So, from there we really jump into the serious parts of this, and any, mix. “Billy Liar” was most likely chosen as the first appearance of The Decemberists because of its mildly Ben Folds-y-ness, the way it busts in with that bouncy piano and all. And The Decemberists are included at all, as I might have mentioned, because of Fred. I think I related this story in an earlier post, about how one of the reasons these mixes started and contained what they did was because of hearing the mixes Fred would bring in and feeling like, hey, you know, it’s ok to put very new and hip and happening stuff on mixes, it doesn’t have to make me feel like a lame bourgeois college hipster. So yeah, “Billy Liar” need no argument about its importance in the Decemberists cannon or in our lives. I’ll just say a few things. The thing about this song for me has always been the way it shifts from the, frankly, silly opening sentiments into the extremely sweeping emotion of the chorus.
When the chorus launches the song just takes flight into something dreamy and transcendent. That little four-note picked guitar part that rides over all the rest and the the harmony vocals in the background are so sweet in their counterpoint that it takes a few listens to even notice them (I am always a sucker for this and need to make a list of some of the songs that always kill me in a similar fashion, cLOUDDEAD “Dead Dogs Two” The Supremes “You Can’t Hurry Love”, Mike Doughty “Madeline and Nine” and so on…).

There was an almost pivotal moment in my life, for reasons I don’t care to go into, when I remember listening to this song and being moved in these ways for the first time. I remember this on my headphones one evening after work maybe, in Harvard Square, running for the bus and maybe it was drizzling a little bit. I was running through the square, past the people, and the chorus was doing its “take flight” thing, and I felt stirred, deeply. I felt like I was in a movie. I felt like I was running towards my life. I felt like I was running and running towards my life. And it felt wonderful.

Next up is the second (!) appearance by our friend Simon Joyner. It’s amazing to me that there are so many long known and beloved friends and mix staples that are appearing here for the first time, or have yet to appear at all, and here, on only the 3rd mix, Simon is a repeat offender.

This one has the sound of his earlier stuff, rougher, more playful, faster. He moved into a lot of much slower, longer and less poppy stuff later on. But here he is, still sounding just like Leornard Cohen or a Bob Dylan, or the grandfather of Connor Oberst. This song, I feel like, was an early landmark for the Kings. I remember a story about Coree singing a variation on this to Zoe about something she was looking for in the apartment, along the lines of “where’d you put the remote control Zoe…” or some such-ness.

Ah Atom, what can we really say. Here he is for the first time, and, as with the WS, a strange choice for a first appearance (I’m actually guessing this was my first attempt at one of the most beloved/annoying mirror facing mirror rules, the cover song/original song inclusion on a mix, though, of course, we were quite a ways off at this point from the very idea of the mirror facing mirror rule). This is also the origin of the Atom rule (which makes it, inadvertently, both the first and second appearance of the mirror facing mirror rule, whoa, you are the ultimate king,) (more on that and all the rules at some point in the not too distant future). This record was a really big thing for all the hardcore kids I knew in Atlanta when I moved back here in 1997. It had just came out and he was one of those odd silly things that came about as a part of the hardcore/house show culture and was not hard at all but was beloved by everyone regardless. Everyone loved this back then like a little brother.

The first time I heard Atom was in someone’s car, driving to someone’s house on a sunny afternoon one day when I was back in NH for a funeral. It immediately jumped out at me from the tape that was playing and, at first, I thought that it was this band Six Cents and Natalie, who do a thing a little like this, electronic, cutesy, but not nearly as fully formed. It was one of those moments where you really love something you’re hearing and hate to admit that you have no idea what it is.

This album really, really reminds me of Halloween time in Atlanta, (and not just because of this Geto Boys cover where he talks about Halloween) and of living on Boulevard drive after we got robbed twice and I took all my stuff back to my mom’s house and was living with just a lamp and a clock and mattress on the floor and little tape player and some tapes. It reminds me of a friend of mine from NH that I was close with for awhile and a package they sent me for my birthday that year which I walked over to the East Atlanta post office and hung around all afternoon trying to get. It was autumn, October, leaves dead all over the ground, orange and read, it was humid and temperate. In short, everything I most closely associate with Halloween and October. And, in turn, it reminds me of some other closely related bands and time, NH just before that time, Helium, Swampscott, Sonic Youth, Magnetic Fields (I have always argued that Atom sounds like Magnetic Fields for kindergarteners, or, later, that Andrew WK sounded like Atom for tough guys) and now I’m really just running into seriously vague territory. Atom is just one of those unlikely bands that is emotionally potent and full of germane memory regardless of the strange association of it. There would, much later be a mix (--161/179[October*/………] which attempted much further explore this association I’m referring to and, even more so, its roots in my time in NH, so many stories I don’t want to try to tell or sum up, so many people I really don’t want to get into or mention by name, alas).

One of the times I saw The Mountain Goats, I think it was at the Middle East up, I remember John prefacing this song by saying that, as far as he knew, from fan interaction and fan clubs and so forth that this song was widely hailed as “the best Mountain Goats song”. And, really, that kind of sums it all up. It, of course, has so much more meaning to me, being from Atlanta, and, I think, to the Kings by proxy in that way (According to Zoe her Atlanta mix for the trip down for the marriage consisted of only this song and Ludacris “Welcome to Altanta” and she proceeded to listen to those two songs over and over about hundred times.) This one had a lot of renewed feeling for me when I moved back here from Boston and spent about a year living out at my mom’s house which is, in fact, about 40 miles from Atlanta and, most certainly, is “nowhere”. It is a Kings tradition to drink and give shout-outs in songs that mention hometowns (and later, even just home regions, the south, New England, etc…) and there are certain bands that just love to talk about Georgia for some reason, The Mountain Goats being one, The Promise Ring, and so on, and when a band has that attribute they always mean that much more to me.

And speaking of the best songs by a band…

“Kiss the Bottle”. It’s all there in this song. This is easily one of the 5 most important songs in all of mix history. This is a song like a rudder, it can steer the whole mix with it’s mere presence (“Screenwriter’s Blues” is another one of those, that one is, I think we can all agree, the single most important song in the history of these mixes, as I think I mentioned in the Antlers post.) This, I know, takes place in San Fran but I have always pictured the liquor store he mentions to be Blanchard’s on the corner of Harvard and Brighton in Allston. It just is this song, that liquor store. It was one of the things I always liked best about living in Allston. It was like living inside of the best Jawbreaker song. I remember hearing people talk about this song in hushed, reverent tones before I was familiar with it. It lived up to the hype.

This was a big moment/triumph for me in early mixing. This song, and other like it, struck me as being to punk or hard or too not-pop to go over well amongst my people and it was one of those amazingly warm moments when I realized that people were getting into it and getting it. Score one for me and punk rock. This is also another mirror facing mirror (from here on I’m just gonna abbreviate M/M) song, this was the origin of the Jawbreaker rule, to sing the chorus of this and then kiss the bottle, when a JB song comes on.

And speaking of the best songs by a band and songs that are the all-time most important to the mixes…

Arguably, for sure, but, for obvious reasons, “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” will always be in my top 5 Decemberists songs. I think I can safely say that those three songs (Kiss the Bottle, Screenwriter’s Blues, Los Angeles, I’m Yours) really actually changed my life. This song came in exactly the right way at exactly the right time. It was like a message from God or The Universe. I was already enamored with/dreaming of escape, and LA and then this song came drifting into my life, and well, there it was.

The funny part I guess, well, I met Bret Easton Ellis recently at a book signing, and during the Q&A he said that he was always amazed when people would come up to him and tell him the Less Than Zero made them want to move to LA. I mean, right? Have you read a different book than he wrote? That horror and disturbing imagery and tremendous lonely sadness made you want to move to LA? He laughs about it and shakes his head and say, well, ok, haha if you say so. And the point is, I think this song is very much a similar creature. It made me fall even more dreamily in love with the city even though it is clearly all about how horrible Colin Meloy thinks LA is. What can I say? I mean, I get it, I really do, all of those things are horrifying, but the times I was there I just never felt them, I never lived them, I only had good experiences and I really believe in the magic reality of it. I believe in the Francesca Lia Block image of LA, the magical reality (if you didn’t read The Weetzie Bat books when you were growing up please, do yourself a favor and read them now. All but one are collected in one book called “Dangerous Angels” go get it. Much like my early correlations between Atom and M Fields or Andrew WK, she is like the polar opposite of Bret Easton’s LA, or like, Gabriel Garcia Marquez for young adults. Seriously, it’s that good). I like this song and that idea because it strikes a chord with me. As a writer I have always felt that my secret weapon/the only thing I have ever really been good at as a writer has always been my apparent ability (so I’m told) to make gross and horrible things seem beautiful, pretty and magical. This song is basically the theme song of that kind of super-power.

And the we are back to Soul Coughing. Last song on Ruby Vroom, and a fitting closer. It sounds exactly like the scene he is describing at the end, late, late, late at night, the room is dark except for the blue light of a television and you are feeling, sad? Hopeless? Hopeful? Reborn? I guess, to me, it’s always sounded like he is leaving her apartment here and driving home and it’s all new and he’s falling in love and probably she might be too. It’s a moment that is wistful and real. It really happens, we’ve really lived it, felt it, experienced it first hand. It is, in this way, one of the most effective and affecting love or loss songs I think I have ever heard.

That song feels like a night ending, the wee hours, leading right up to the last moments of dark, as the sun starts to come up, and you are trying to fall asleep while there is still some dark (because really, one of the worst, most defeated feelings in this life, is the one where you’ve been up all night and that’s fine, but then the sky starts to lighten and the sun starts to come up and you just feel so bummed out, so beaten, it would have been great if would have stayed dark forever, but, no, here comes the sun, and that is where our next song picks up…)

This one really feels like the sun coming up, the day dawning, and not in a good way. Continuing out LA theme in full force, man I love a song about LA. And, I mean, Elliott probably knows that new day/defeat feeling more than most of us do I’m guessing. This song is really basically all about the feeling I was just describing. After a long night of God knows what, smack, other drugs, alcohol, despair, elation, the sun is coming up, it is another beautiful sunny day in LA and you have to go out there and face it, with only sunglasses to protect you from a hangover and the worst morning after feelings you’ve ever had. “Living in the day, but last night I was about to throw it all away…” This one reminds me of that scene in Permanent Midnight where Ben Stiller is talking about how his character would wake up at 9 drink some wheat grass, then it’s outside for a 5 mile run (wait a second, are you telling me you’d shoot heroin and run 5 miles? his friend interjects, to which he replies, “Hey, I was a junky but I was an LA junky…”)
LA vampires, check in…

Ok, then we are back to “Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me” this time by its original proprietors, The Get Boys. I guess I said most of what I needed to in the previous post with the actual video for this. Please refer to that.

Can’t say what led to this little punk rock suite here at the end. It was certainly added in the later stages of this mix’s construction. “As the Eternal Cowboy” wasn’t that old at this point and Against Me was a pretty big deal to a lot of people in Boston for quite awhile. How it ended up as a part of out mixology I am really not sure. Although I do, vividly remember, choosing these two AM songs because they were the shortest and fastest.

This Get Up Kids record was actually pretty new around this time and it was also refreshingly good. Kind of a throwback to “Something to Write Home About” after venturing off the path into other sounds on the album before it. This one just always struck me as a really strong melodic moment for them. One made even more proven strong by the fact that it manages to be great despite the terribly clichéd lyrics to the chorus.

A friend of mine from, then, a few years before, turned me on to the first two Weakerthans albums and I got pretty into it. They kind of totally personified that intelligent and political “Punk Planet” sound to me. And yes, at times they get a little cloying in that regard, but they still can turn a pop tune when it’s called for. Case in point, “Anchorless”, originally a Propaghandi song (this kid is also a member of that band, kind of cool to cover your own song with your other band) is just a good solid punk song that isn’t particularly “punk”.

Hearing this song always made me think of “The Boat Dreams From the Hill” by Jawbreaker, and all the times we’d play this mix at work Id always think that song should be paired up, and so, in what I know for a fact to be the very last change made to this mix before making it to this permanent version, I added this song. First song from the first album after Blake’s throat surgery, and hence his much clearer sounding voice. In essence, this song is the first statement they made after “Kiss the Bottle” the “last song before Blake’s throat surgery”. In that sense it feels that much more reborn, renewed, I don’t want to be an old man any more, it’s been a year or two since I was out on the floor, I don’t want to be forgotten and unfinished in some backyard with weeds growing all around me. I have certainly felt that, we all have.

The another AM song, if you’re into the sunrise aesthetic…

And this ends our punk rock detour and it’s back to mix certainties like
“Down to This”. Solid, always a fan pleaser, Zoe thought he said “you get the angles and I’ll get the rest(?) risks(?)” I think. And to that end I am always retelling to the Kings a story Mike Doughty told (as it turns out, on the back of the “Down to This” promo single, pictured below) I’ll let him tell the story…




“Independence Day” has always been one of my favorite ES songs. It was one of my two favorites on XO (the other was “Bled White” at the time) And, really, it still is. I like to share the trivia at Kings when this comes on that this was, apparently, the only ES song to use a drum-loop, who knew. The thing for me on this song is the softness of it. It’s so effective but it manages to just gently bounce along and whisper and loop. Those “ooohs” and “ahh, ahhhh”s, the little falsetto harmonies, it’s all so lovely. There’s a little breakdown part around the 2:16-2:20 mark that always sounded, to me, like a quotation of the guitar part from “Clementine” and that gave the song a much deeper and more resonant presence than it already had. I’m also always a sucker for people referring to holidays by their less-used names.

And finally, speaking of the best songs by a band,
speaking of gentle and affecting,

regardless of what anyone says this is always going to be my all-time favorite Mountain Goats song. It’s really so, so delicate. John Darnielle, while certainly capable of gentleness and subtlety and delicacy can also be very bang bang bang on the guitar, but here, it’s like, he’s banging it out, and yet the guitar feels so light and pretty. “And as we crossed over the Frog’s Neck Bridge I had something on my mind…” It’s just so pretty, so perfect. We all know that he’s in love with her, we know what’s happening, but he doesn’t have to spell it out. In the song it is just as it would be in real life, in the actual story he is describing. He is riding along in a car with her, doing something, doing nothing, just moments from life that are non-descript, of no particular import, and it’s in these moments, sometimes, when we realize and feel the most, what we really feel about things. Sometimes it is just the absolute nothingness, the mundane, boring, insignificant parts of life that completely define and illustrate the most deeply felt parts of it. The hair on my neck still stands up on that line. Even the second time around, when he comes back to the chorus and he’s telling us he’s never loved anyone like he loves her, he’s still not really spelling it out, he still had some undefined, obscure thing on his mind. It is this wonderful sweetness, this tiny, pretty secret he is not ready to talk about yet, but he is smiling and beaming in excited anticipation (“I had never loved anyone like I loved you…”)

This song made me smile such a great deal when I knew I was getting ready to propose to Jennifer but was not sure when or how I was going to do it.




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ALT VERSIONS

--003a
In the first attempt at this mix “True Dreams of Wichita” goes into a cover of “Hey Ya” by Yo La Tengo, featuring somebody’s daughter doing back up vocals. “Hey Ya” was still a pretty big deal at Bmax or maybe had just stopped being. I remember when that song brok we used to play it over and over again and me and Cabrie and Brian Henning and Liz and whoever else was there would dance and freak out to it. This was certainly a reasonable addition to the mix but the recording is pretty low-volume and would kind of throw off the feel of the mix for that reason (long before I had the technology to change things like input levels on songs), and so it was excised.
I’m not sure how much of the difference I should spell out and how much I should just leave to people comparing track lists. We’ll see.

The next song on the earliest version of this is Night Rally’s “A Birthday Party”. This was around the time that my band, Spiders, was still very much alive and happening and Night Rally were sort of the elder statesmen of the Allston/81 Linden family, soon to be too big to really play basement shows. This was from the only thing they had out at that time, a four song demo CD. This song I remember from seeing them live and it has always stood out to me, it still stirs me pretty deeply. Though, to be honest, the version they had on their “official” CD is far inferior to this demo. Not sure how it ended up here other than being a song that was big to me at that moment, but I guess it didn’t seem to have much of a ripple in my audience and so it was trunked for year later use. Well, actually, this song hasn’t been used again, yet, but Night Rally has certainly figured extremely prominently in some later day mixes and in my mind (in particular the “F” mix, which, at its heart and inception, was for Fred, though, to this day, Fred has not received it. Much more on that mix at some point…)

The next song not used is the TI classic “Bring ‘em Out”, this was huge then, and still is. It was perfectly at home on this mix and only taken off because, as mentioned, hip-hop was the fastest way to get your CD turned off by the owners of Bmax. And so it was removed not for mixing reasons, only because I was tired of running back to the CD player and either turning it way down or skipping the song completely.

Next up is the 3rd and 4th movements of R Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” saga. Both wonderful in and of themselves, but, as mentioned, very unpopular with Coree. And, while one person is not the rudder to steer the mixes, one person’s dissent is all I need to get kind of hung up and discouraged, always wanting to please all of them all of the time I guess. And so, again, those plans of serializing this were abandoned. Sigh.

And finally, on the original version of the mix those two songs are, for some reason, followed by the lovely “Ain’t No Lie” by Ida/His Name is Alive. I honestly can’t recall why this ended up on the mix, and even less so, why here in the track list. I am sure this was around the time I first heard it and I think it kind of keyed into the down home, acoustic, southern feel that I love/d and was trying to work in, but still. I think this is a classic “kill your darlings” situation. I’m sure it was something that meant a lot to me and I wanted to include but that just didn’t work then and so, had to go. It is worth noting though that this song does make a pretty good segue into “Anchorless” as it was originally planned.

The major changes on this mix take place from version 1 to version 2. “Ain’t No Lie”, :A Birthday Party” and “Hey Ya” are all axed, replaced with the Hefner, Papas Fritas, and one of the Against Me tracks. Still trying to hold onto TI and R Kelly. By version 3 R Kelly was a goner and the Get Up Kids and The White Stripes had been inserted. And finally I gave up the ghost on TI and put that JB song where I always thought it should be.

At some point, not too long before I left Boston, we had a series of Kings games where we played the “original” lost versions of the mixes to try to get back as close as possible to the original moments of it all. I am certainly a sucker for getting as stripped down and close to the first moments of a thing as is possible. Even if that entails dealing with deficiencies and artlessness. I like to experience things exactly as they were first intended.
In the case of the holy 1-8 I think this mix had the most stirring reaction and “what tha?”/”really?!”-ness factor of any of them.

I guess after having come up with two near perfect mixes, accidentally, I was struggling to define the system and codes and rules for something I had inadvertently begun.


























Thanks to Coree for finally helping me to understand how to make a "screencap" (who knew is was so damn easy!) I know it's not quite as authentic feeling as the literal pics of the screen I was taking but I think, in the end, it will be much easier for everyone to follow.




it is 4:36 AM
this is the seance































xo