Category: Music

2024 Mother’s Day Mix

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Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate! As children of the 80s and 90s, mixtapes played a prominent role in my courtship of My Loving Wife Marion. Or rather, mix CDs did. One of the first ones I gave her included the song “Under the Milky Way Tonight” by the Church as track nine. We later chose it for our first dance at our wedding, which took place on August 9. I’ve made it the ninth track on every mix I’ve given her since then, which I try to do at least once a year, usually on Mother’s Day or her birthday. With her permission I’m posting the track listing for the one she received this weekend, since it’s more indebted to the movies than usual. Although: films are often are the way I discover new old music these days and the mix I made her last year was heavily influenced by movies as well, so maybe this is the continuation of a trend? Anyway, the other convention I honor is limiting the mix to just 80 minutes worth of music, since that was the length of the CD-Rs that got this tradition started. Without further ado, here’s what is included on Marion’s 2024 Mother’s Day mix along with notes about the films that inspired each selection:

  1. Ian Tracey, Garfield Wilson, and Pirate Chorus – “Ode to the Falling.” This is from the soundtrack for Peter Pan & Wendy, which was directed by David Lowery, the François Truffaut of the “film blogosphere” (am I the first person to use that term in a decade?), and one of our “Friday Movie Night” selections last year.
  2. Band Nada Kentjana – “Djaleuludja.” This is from the soundtrack for Before, Now & Then, which I reviewed for Educational Media Reviews Online last month.
  3. Janis Martin – “Cry Guitar.” Film critic Sheila O’Malley mentioned Martin on her blog a couple of months ago, which prompted me to give her a listen.
  4. Giorgio Moroder – “Ivory Tower.” This is of course from the soundtrack for The NeverEnding Story, a favorite of Marion’s.
  5. Sergio Bruni – “Canzona Appassiunata.” This is from the soundtrack for The King of Laughter, which I reviewed for Educational Media Reviews Online last year.
  6. Pet Shop Boys – “Always on My Mind.” As I mentioned in my “Top Ten Movies of 2023” blog post, the scene in All of Us Strangers that this song appears in was one of my favorites of the year.
  7. Toots & the Maytals – “Pressure Drop.” I listened to a lot of reggae after the MUBI Podcast devoted a show to The Harder They Come last April.
  8. Michel Legrand – “Concerto from The Young Girls of Rochefort.” This one is, uh, from the soundtrack for The Young Girls of Rochefort, which was the subject of our February, 2024 “Drink & a Movie” blog post.
  9. The Church – “Under the Milky Way Tonight.” For the reasons described above!
  10. Grandaddy – “Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake.” No movie connection here, just a good song by a band Marion likes.
  11. Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris – “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” No movie connection here, either, just a new to me cover of one of my favorite songs from Back to Mono.
  12. David Bowie – “Chilly Down.” This is Marion’s favorite song from the soundtrack for Labyrinth, a recent Friday Movie Night selection.
  13. New Order – “Hellbent.” I regularly do this annoying thing where I listen to every album from a band or solo artist in chronological order, which would be fine except that everyone else in my family doesn’t necessarily want to come downstairs to New Order every morning for two weeks. Anyway, Marion noted that she liked this song.
  14. John Carpenter – “Night.” This appears on the soundtrack for Bacurau, the subject of our May, 2023 “Drink & a Movie” blog post.
  15. Sandy Lam – “Ji Qing.” This is from the soundtrack for As Tears Go By and I think the MUBI Podcast must have mentioned it in their show about Chungking Express last April?
  16. Brian Eno – “Fat Lady of Limbourg.” No movie connection: they played “Back In Judy’s Jungle” at the Cherry Circle Room in Chicago when I went there last year during ALA Annual and it reminded me that it had been a minute since the last time I listened to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), which is an awesome album.
  17. The Waterboys – “The Whole of the Moon.” No direct movie connection, but the Waterboys’ song “Fisherman’s Blues” was on the soundtrack for Waking Ned Devine, which I saw at the Point of View Cinema (RIP) in Millersville, PA in high school. I dug it enough to buy it on CD, and that’s what was playing when I lost my virginity. So now you know that about me!
  18. Little Anthony & The Imperials – “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” No movie connection: Little Anthony & The Imperials was another group I gave the “listen to every song in order” treatment to last year.
  19. Mohammed Rafi – “Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To.” From the soundtrack for Pyaasa, the subject of our November, 2023 “Drink & a Movie” blog post.
  20. Kacey Musgraves – “Cardinal.” No movie connection: just a good song that Marion likes from an album that came out this year!
  21. Manon Hollander – “Marie Douceur, Marie Colère.” From the soundtrack for John Wick: Chapter 4. Who doesn’t love foreign language versions of classic rock songs?

Enjoy!

Links to previous mixes I’ve posted about can be found here.

2023: The Mixtape, Vol. 2 + “Drink & a Movie” at the Halfway Mark

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As longtime readers of this blog know, I stubbornly insist on waiting until Oscar night to write about my favorite films of the Movie Year (as I call it) since I haven’t had an opportunity to see critically-acclaimed titles like The Zone of Interest and The Taste of Things that haven’t opened in Ithaca yet, but will before March 10. I am, however, happy to announce the track listing for my 2023: The Mixtape, Vol. 2 Spotify playlist:

  1. Wilco – Pittsburgh
  2. Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily – To Remain/To Return
  3. Aesop Rock – Mindful Solutionism
  4. Park Doing – You Know What to Do
  5. The Armed – Everything’s Glitter
  6. Homeboy Sandman – Crazy
  7. Diners – Your Eyes Look Like Christmas
  8. Soccer Mommy – Losing My Religion
  9. Jaimie Branch – borealis dancing
  10. Jeff Rosenstock – LIKED U BETTER
  11. Tyler Childers – Rustin’ In The Rain
  12. Ryan Gosling – Push
  13. Jess Williamson – God in Everything
  14. Lankum – Lord Abore and Mary Flynn
  15. The Beatles – Now and Then
  16. Sofia Kourtesis – Madres
  17. Robbie Robertson – Still Standing

You know it has been a good six months in music when a new Mountain Goats album comes out and nothing from it makes the cut! I’m not sure I have a ton else to say about this batch of songs, though, except that I like them. I attended college in Pittsburgh from 2000-2004 and have memories of listening to Yourself or Someone Like You on overnight bus trips over the holidays, so it’s maybe a bit more backwards-looking than usual? The “Losing My Religion” cover and presence of a Beatles song would support this reading as well, but there’s also plenty pushing against it–Lankum and Sofia Kourtesis are both new discoveries for me from this past year, for instance, and Park Doing is an Ithaca-based musician. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this mix as much as I do! Links to previous bi-annual mixes can be found here.

* * *

In other news, the publication of my January Drink & a Movie post saw that series reach its halfway point. As I have mentioned previously, I’m thinking of this project as gradually constructing a year-long weekly film series: my idea is that once I’ve written about 53 movies, I can self-publish a book with an introduction that people can use to make themselves a seasonally-appropriate cocktail and settle in with a good film every Friday night. At the risk of sounding immodest (and maybe delusional if you disagree), I’m pretty happy with how they’ve been turning out lately! More importantly, I’m learning a lot about what exactly I value in movies and enjoying collaborating with My Loving Wife (who has been killing it on the photography front all year) on a creative endeavor. A full list of the 27 entries we’ve completed so far can be found here. I’m still behind schedule because of the holidays, so it might be awhile before things start going up on the first of the month again, but I’ve got a “bonus” post planned for February 2.

Cheers!

2023: The Mixtape, Vol. 1

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We aren’t even halfway through June, but I have already discovered enough great new music to finalize part one of my semi-annual celebration of everything I’m listening to! My favorite song of 2023 so far is probably Gary Gunn’s opening theme for A Thousand and One. My cinephilia may also be showing in the inclusion of Róisín Murphy’s “The Universe,” which is here in large part because it reminds me of Triangle of Sadness, and “Testing” by Lonnie Holley, director (with Cyrus Moussavi) of I Snuck Off the Slave Ship. Other highlights include John Cale’s first appearance in this series and new work by regulars The Hold Steady and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. But obviously I think *everything* is great! Here’s a full listing of all the tracks included on this Spotify playlist I created:

  1. billy woods and Kenny Segal – Kenwood Speakers
  2. Gary Gunn – Opening Theme From A Thousand and One
  3. Parranoul – Blossom
  4. Tyler, the Creator – Lumberjack
  5. The Hold Steady – The Birdwatchers
  6. Witch – By the Time You Realize
  7. Gina Birch – Big Mouth
  8. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – King of Oklahoma
  9. H.C. McEntire feat. Amy Ray – Turpentine
  10. Róisín Murphy feat. DJ Koze – The Universe
  11. 100 gecs – One Million Dollars
  12. John Cale feat. Sylvan Esso – Time Stands Still
  13. MC Yallah feat. Debmaster – Sikwebela
  14. Model/Actriz – Mosquito
  15. boygenius – Cool About It
  16. Scree – Victory Signs
  17. Lonnie Holley – Testing
  18. Margo Price feat. Sharon Van Etten – Radio
  19. Yo La Tengo – Tonight’s Episode
  20. Lucero – Macon If We Make It

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”

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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!