The Makings of a Mix
I’ve been pretty absent from the online world for the past week or so. I was out in the real world, doing real world things and in the process put hundreds of miles on my car. The benefit of being stuck in my car for so long is listening to lots and lots of great music. While driving along Interstate 80 somewhere in the heart of Pennsylvania a few of my favorite songs came on. Ok, well, they “came on” because I hit the play button on my iPhone, but still, they came on at what seemed to be the most scenic part of the drive. These are songs that I have really loved for quite a while but at that moment they seemed like the perfect soundtrack for an autumn day.
The first track is “Journey of the Featherless” by Cloud Cult off of their 2008 album Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes). This is probably the most lighthearted track from the album and while it may have some lyrics that seem a bit silly (“don’t sell my stuff on ebay”, anyone?), when Craig Minowa sings it I totally buy into the cheesiness. I don’t know, this song just feels like fall to me. Is it the imagery portrayed in the lyrics? The strings and vocals? Whatever it is, I can’t break from the autumnal feel this song has given me.
The next track is “Your Rocky Spine” by Great Lake Swimmers from the 2007 album Ongiara. Now, based on the lyrics of this song one could possibly say, “Oh no no! This song is totally winter. Come on! He sings about glaciers!”. To this imaginary naysayer, I would simply say, “No sir, you are wrong!” because they would totally be wrong. It has a banjo! We all know banjos equal fall! Ok, maybe this is a completely invalid argument, but you listen to this track and tell me that it doesn’t make you want to put on a sweater, grab a chai latte, and go look at the leaves changing colors.
I used to be really huge into making mixtapes (yes, tapes!) and if I were putting one together for the fall both of these songs would definitely be on there. Now, I haven’t gone all High Fidelity and thought about where these songs would fall (see what I did there) on the the playlist or what this particular mix would be called, but I was never really good at that part. What I think I do pretty well is finding songs that I love and relating them to that particular moment in my life – for me right now, that’s enjoying the change of the seasons.
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