November 01, 2010

127 The Whiskey River

The first four tracks on this mix all clumped together. I started with "Horchata", from Vampire Weekend's second album Contra. (FYI, a horchata is a traditional beverage, made of ground almonds, sesame seeds, rice, barley, or tigernuts.) With "Horchata" as the germ, I built three other songs with fun and exotic instrumentation around it: the pseudo-reggae of "Last Night", the steel drums of the least-cool Rod Stewart song ever, and the accordion of "Gumboots", from Paul Simon's Graceland (aka "You don't feel you could love me/But I feel you could")
  1. "Last Night" Traveling Wilburys
  2. "Horchata" Vampire Weekend
  3. "Love Touch" Rod Stewart
  4. "Gumboots" Paul Simon
  5. "Peace Train" 10,000 Maniacs; I just saw Yusuf, aka Cat Stevens, at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.
  6. "An Innocent Man" Billy Joel
  7. "Sentimental Heart" She & Him
  8. "Ruby Tuesday" The Rolling Stones
  9. "Summer" Buffalo Tom
  10. "We Are Sex Bob-Omb" from Sex Bob-Omb dovetails nicely into...
  11. "Yer Blues" The Beatles
  12. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" Muddy Waters inspired the title of this mix:
  13. If the river was whiskey, and I was a divin' duck
    I would dive to the bottom, never would I come up
  14. "Damn Good" David Lee Roth: Have you ever completely forgotten a song? Forgotten a song so completely that you don't even remember knowing it in the first place? I recently bought David Lee Roth's solo CD Skyscraper for $1. David Lee Roth's solo career took off when I was a teenage Van Halen fan, so me and my friends had a lot of loyalty to Diamond Dave. I wanted the CD for the hit single "Living In Paradise", but for the heck of it I listened to the whole disc one day. That's when I rediscovered "Damn Good", an acoustic ballad (with nice guitar work from Steve Vai.) It's NOT a "damn good" song, BUT the point is, I had not heard the song in 22 years! It was weird dusting the cobwebs off this teenage memory.
  15. "Put Me On Top" Aimee Mann
  16. "Bang Bang Bang" Tracy Chapman
  17. "Smoke On The Water" Deep Purple
  18. "Hunger Strike" Temple of the Dog
  19. "I Hate Myself For Loving You" Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, the original version, before it was appropriated for Monday Night Football.
  20. "I Love Your Smile" Shanice I think I added this song because I saw someone on TV named Shanice?
  21. "Shadowboxer" Fiona Apple