Category: Music

2022: The Mixtape, Vol. 2 + Year-End Musings

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As mentioned previously on this blog, I have been creating mixtape-length (no more than 80 minutes each) Spotify playlists of new music I’ve been enjoying semi-annually since 2011. I’ve been posting links to them on Twitter since 2019, but in keeping with one of my New Year’s resolutions (see below), I’m going to begin spinning them into blog posts starting with this one. One of my favorite things about this project is the evidence it provides of just exactly how my music tastes are evolving. Previous trends I’ve noticed are the increasing prominence of country music (especially as written and performed by women) and jazz. Lately, more and more film music is creeping in to these mixes as well, which makes sense considering that I’m seeing more movies in theaters than I have in a decade. It has also been interesting to me to see how emo has continued to have a place in my life thanks to bands like The Wonder Years whose preoccupations are changing apace with my own. Where we used to spend way too much time mooning over crushes, now we fret about parenting in an age of global warming and gun violence. Anyway, without further ado, here’s a link to my 2022: The Mixtape, Vol. 2 playlist followed by the tracks included on it:

  1. Colin Stetson – Our Side or Theirs
  2. $ilkMoney – I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms and Bwoy Oh Bwoy
  3. quinn – you don’t gotta be here if you don’t wone’a
  4. Hildur Guðnadóttir – For Petra (vocal version)
  5. Hedvig Mollestad / Trondheim Jazz Orchestra – Do Re Mi Ma Ma
  6. The Wonder Years – You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End
  7. Duval Timothy feat. Yu Su – Wood
  8. Taylor Swift feat. Lana Del Rey – Snow On The Beach
  9. Camp Cope – Running with the Hurricane
  10. Saul Williams – Pensent Comme Leurs Livres Disent (Think Like They Book Say)
  11. Alex G – Mission
  12. The Mountain Goats – Extraction Point
  13. Doja Cat – Vegas
  14. Porridge Radio – Back To The Radio
  15. Grace Ives – Shelly
  16. Craig Finn – The Amarillo Kid
  17. Carter Burwell – The Mystery of Inisherin
  18. Amanda Shires – Lonely At Night
  19. Sofie Royer – Feeling Bad Forsyth Street
  20. Weyes Blood – Children of the Empire

* * *

All over the world people are publishing lists of their favorite movies of 2022. For the first time in a decade, I’ve actually seen enough new films (I posted about ~40 on Twitter) to contemplate doing the same myself, which means it’s time to resurrect one of the better ideas I had during my first go-round as a film blogger, the movie year. You’ve heard of calendar and academic years, yes? This is the same basic concept. If you live in Los Angeles or New York, by now you’ve had an opportunity to see most of the year’s major releases, especially if you’ve also attended a few film festivals or regularly receive screeners. None of this applies to me or most of the other people I know who live in what the trades may or may not still refer to as “flyover country.” I’ve seen many of the most significant films of 2022, sure, but quite a few more will arrive in Ithaca between now and March, in part because distributors time their releases around the Academy Award nominations they hope to receive. At the risk of according too much significance to the ceremony itself, Oscar night therefore makes MUCH more sense as a time to look back on the previous year for someone like me than New Year’s Day or Eve, so that’s what I’m gonna do. I’ll share my thoughts on how appropriate the the Top Ten List format is for non-professional film writers (spoiler alert: it ain’t) at that time as well. Stay tuned!

* * *

What I will post now are a few New Year’s resolutions. As announced in July, I’ve decided to keep my Drink & a Movie series going four full years because I’m having loads of fun and there’s stuff I want to do with it after I have enough posts for a 52-week-long film series. This idea started as a way of achieving last year’s New Year’s resolution to blog more, and part of the way I accomplished it was by pushing myself to get each month’s post up by the first or second Saturday of each month. Now that I’ve successfully gotten back into the habit of writing regularly, though, I’m going to be less rigid with the timing and concentrate on trying to say something original about each film I tackle. On the drink front, My Loving Wife and I are also going to focus more on presentation, including garnishes.

That’s all intentionally somewhat vague. More concretely, I hereby resolve to follow up the tweets I’ve been posting announcing which screenings I’m planning to attend (which are intended to promote my local theaters, help me keep track of what I’ve seen, and give people a chance to say “I’ll meet you there!”) with a “one tweet take” on everything by way of becoming more comfortable sharing my opinions on things I haven’t yet had an opportunity to think deeply about and hopefully engaging in more conversations about them. Last but not least, I’m going to sprinkle more additional content like this in amongst my Drink & a Movie posts. On that same note, I’ve actually got a post about film criticism (a topic that I hope to revisit a few times in 2023) about half finished, so it’s not inconceivable that I could be back tomorrow or Saturday. I’m not going to rush, though, so: Happy New Year, and thanks for reading!

“Bests”

andyhorbalLeave a comment

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:

A Decade in the Life, Vol. 1:

  1. Youth Lagoon – 17
  2. Strand of Oaks – Plymouth
  3. Ashley Monroe – Mother’s Daughter
  4. Craig Finn – Maggie I’ve Been Searching For Our Son
  5. The Wonder Years – Raining in Kyoto
  6. Baroness – Mtns. (The Crown & Anchor)
  7. Danny Brown – Grown Up
  8. Frank Ocean – Moon River
  9. Alex Winston – Locomotive
  10. Bruce Springsteen – Hello Sunshine
  11. Lori McKenna – The Bird & The Rifle
  12. Future ft. André 3000 – Benz Friends (Whatchutola)
  13. Chromatics – The River
  14. The 1975 – Paris
  15. Cloud Nothings – Stay Useless
  16. The Comet Is Coming – Summon The Fire
  17. DJ Quik – Fire And Brimstone
  18. Alison Krauss – You Don’t Know Me
  19. Spiritualized – So Long You Pretty Thing

A Decade in the Life, Vol. 2:

  1. Lucy Dacus – Fool’s Gold
  2. Jon Hopkins – Immunity
  3. Brand New – Limousine
  4. Vince Staples – Hands Up
  5. Shearwater – Quiet Americans
  6. Kamasi Washington – Fists of Fury
  7. Miranda Lambert – Runnin’ Just in Case
  8. Serengeti – Directions
  9. Laura Gibson – Milk-Heavy, Pollen-Eyed
  10. Sam Hunt – 2016
  11. Logic ft. Big Lenbo – Young Jesus
  12. The Mountain Goats – Harlem Roulette
  13. Aesop Rock – Marble Cake
  14. Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Sunday Candy
  15. Sturgill Simpson – The Promise
  16. Gord Downie – Bedtime
  17. 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.

* * *

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!