September 01, 2010

126: Summerbeast

  1. "Run" Vampire Weekend
  2. "Driver 8" The Old '97s. A slightly harder-rocking, slightly less subtle version of one of my favorite R.E.M. songs.
  3. "Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)" Icicle Works. Rediscovered on a VH1 1980s video showcase.
  4. "Jealous Again" The Black Crowes. A live, in-studio, acoustic performance, from the new Crowes album.
  5. "Never" Heart. So richly imbued with Eighties-ness, it's hard to mix this track among other less exuberantly artifical songs...
  6. "TiK ToK" ...until Ke$ha came along.
  7. "Wash Your Face In My Sink" The Dream Warriors. Was this Canadian hip-hop duo a one-hit wonder, or was this song popular only among me and my friends at WERS in 1991?
  8. "The Distance" Cake. Before I met my wife, I only new Cake as the 1990s alt rock band which covered "I Will Survive". I mostly hate disco, and this Gloria Gaynor song is one of my least-favorite hits in a genre I hate already. To sum up: Cake's cover is a boring, overlong, overly ironic remake of a song I hated in the first place. It turns out my wife has, like, four Cake CDs, and in the intervening years, I have found a bunch of their songs I actually like, including "The Distance", one of my new ringtones.
  9. "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" I don't listen to Jimi Hendrix enough. I gotta start putting him on more mix CDs. Mostly this song makes me think of a) hippies, and b) that scene it's in in Almost Famous, when the band trades in their bus for the jet plane.
  10. "Free Fallin" [live], from the comprehensive new Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Live Anthology. Great sing-along from the audience.
  11. "One True Love" Semisonic is another one-hit 1990s alt-rock band, whom I have gotten to know better. Around the turn of the century I really got into their almost-hit "Chemistry", and later, the drummer wrote a memoir which could have been titled "What It's Like To Be A One Hit Wonder."If you want to dig deeper into 1990s nostalgia, check it out. Jen Trynin also wrote a book about her year in the spotlight, which could have been called "I Would Have Been Alanis Morrisette (If It Weren't For Alanis Morrisette.)"
  12. "Via Chicago" Wilco. We went to Wilco's music and arts festival in North Adams this summer. This track is from Wilco's album Summerteeth.
  13. "Stratford-On-Guy" Liz Phair. I have the complete Rolling Stone magazine, cover-to-cover, on DVD (1967-2007.) Around the time I was assembling this mix I re-read Liz' 1994 Rolling Stone cover story.
  14. "Do You Love Me" Ridiculously catchy new Guster song, with pleasant Wall of Sound production.
  15. "Can't Do A Thing (To Stop Me)" Chris Isaak. Apparently there's a cable channel called FUSE, which aired a special Fifty Sexiest Music Videos Ever. My wife and I were not surprised to find the "Wicked Game" video at Number One, which inspired including this Isaak song.
  16. "Hackensack" [live, acoustic] The fact that Katy Perry has heard Fountains of Wayne, and recorded a nice cover song, has raised my opinion of her. It's still unfortunate that she married Russell Brand.
  17. "Ugly Truth Rock" Matthew Sweet
  18. "1901" Phoenix. It's like Duran Duran and Joy Division had a love child in France with Bryan Ferry as the midwife.
  19. "Pictures of Matchstick Men" Camper Van Beethoven
  20. "It Ain't The Cold War Harry" Grant-Lee Phillips