For the past few months I’ve been revisiting the “mixtapes” (really playlists, but old habits die hard: I originally DID use actual cassettes for mixtaping, and then for a long while I always made sure to burn a CD, hence the 80-minute maximum length, but now I mostly just listen on my computer, phone, or TV) of new music that I’ve been making semi-annually since 2011. I started shortly after I moved away from Pittsburgh, the city where I had been dwelling for the past decade and my entire adult life, to take my first librarian job. Shaken out of my various ruts, I realized that it had been years since I had kept up with new music, so at the end of that year I resolved to listen to every album on Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2011 list. Having taken that step, it was inevitable that I would burn my favorites onto a CD so that I could listen to them in the car.
Librarian work and Spotify turned out to be a match made in heaven, and ten years later I still listen to a few hundred new albums a year at least once. In 2012 I mixed my favorite tracks into six CDs, which was excessive; from 2013-2015 I made a CD every season; finally, in 2016 I figured out that two CDs per year, one in June/July and one in December/January, was the perfect number. I always knew that if I kept this up long enough, I would eventually make some kind of “decade in review” mix, which is what brings me here today.
There no rules for my annual mixes, but I typically try to avoid including more than one track by the same artist and stick to original music released during the year in question. I’m also clear in my mind, and try to be clear in my references, that these are not necessarily the best songs of the year in my opinion, but rather the ones that gave me the most pleasure and/or affected me the most. All of this goes for these two mixes, which for want of a better idea I’m calling “A Decade in the Life” Vols. 1 and 2, as well. I also made sure to include at least one song from every year, and donated both track nines to my wife Marion. About that: I gave her a mix CD on our third or fourth date as one does, the ninth track of which was “Under the Milky Way Tonight” by The Church. This became the song we selected for our first dance at our wedding a few years later, which took place on August 9. Ever since then, “Under the Milky Way Tonight” is track nine on every mix I make for her. These mixes don’t get nearly as much playtime in our car as they used to, especially not since the pandemic nixed long distance travel, but she still listens to more music chosen by me than she really wants to, so I thought it was only fair to make sure at least a couple of HER favorite songs made the cut. Anyway, without further ado, here are Spotify URLs and track listings for both mixes:
- Youth Lagoon – 17
- Strand of Oaks – Plymouth
- Ashley Monroe – Mother’s Daughter
- Craig Finn – Maggie I’ve Been Searching For Our Son
- The Wonder Years – Raining in Kyoto
- Baroness – Mtns. (The Crown & Anchor)
- Danny Brown – Grown Up
- Frank Ocean – Moon River
- Alex Winston – Locomotive
- Bruce Springsteen – Hello Sunshine
- Lori McKenna – The Bird & The Rifle
- Future ft. André 3000 – Benz Friends (Whatchutola)
- Chromatics – The River
- The 1975 – Paris
- Cloud Nothings – Stay Useless
- The Comet Is Coming – Summon The Fire
- DJ Quik – Fire And Brimstone
- Alison Krauss – You Don’t Know Me
- Spiritualized – So Long You Pretty Thing
- Lucy Dacus – Fool’s Gold
- Jon Hopkins – Immunity
- Brand New – Limousine
- Vince Staples – Hands Up
- Shearwater – Quiet Americans
- Kamasi Washington – Fists of Fury
- Miranda Lambert – Runnin’ Just in Case
- Serengeti – Directions
- Laura Gibson – Milk-Heavy, Pollen-Eyed
- Sam Hunt – 2016
- Logic ft. Big Lenbo – Young Jesus
- The Mountain Goats – Harlem Roulette
- Aesop Rock – Marble Cake
- Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Sunday Candy
- Sturgill Simpson – The Promise
- Gord Downie – Bedtime
- Sharon Van Etten – Seventeen
As mentioned above, I started my first librarian job shortly embarking on this project. I also turned thirty, ate at Volt, met and eventually married Marion, bought and sold a house, had two kids, adopted two dogs, watched the Mets lose a World Series, got tenure, voluntarily left that position for one without tenure less than a year later, and moved to my current hometown of Ithaca, New York. It was, in short, an eventful period, and this is the music that carried me through it.
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Since I’m here anyway writing about something which is kind of like a “Best of” list, I feel compelled to acknowledge that on August 5 I mentioned on Twitter that I had seen five movies worth including on year-end list, and that I was therefore tentatively planning on creating such a thing. Little did the person who wrote that know just how much more (let’s just say “virtual kindergarten” and leave it at that) 2020 had in store for him. I’m sorry to say that I saw very few additional new movies between that tweet and the end of the year, and that my Top Five list thus remains unchanged. For anyone who didn’t feel like clicking the link, the films I’m talking about are, in alphabetical order: Bacurau, Fourteen, Miss Juneteenth, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, and Tommaso. Here’s the thing, though: that’s a pretty impressive list! Add to that the facts that I saw one of my favorite films of the last BUNCH of years, Uncut Gems, at Cinemapolis early in 2020; that I enjoyed one of the great moviegoing experiences of my life when I took my daughter to see Frozen II at Cornell Cinema right before COVID-19 closed everything down; and that we MAY be witnessing the dawn of a Golden Age of holiday movies (which is basically the only kind I watch between Thanksgiving and Boxing Day) thanks to content-hungry streaming video services, and you get a year that at least in this one realm weirdly maybe wasn’t so bad after all.
I am not at all confident that I will be able to do much writing in 2021. I did, however, manage to finish THIS post, and we actually have been doing a pretty okay job of making space for movie nights lately, and I feel like an essay about National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (speaking of holiday movies) would pretty much write itself at this point, so who knows? Whatever the future may hold, I’m grateful to be here now. Stay safe, everybody!
The Prodigal Cinephile 