Pine trees and icicles and carolers — check. But can we please just talk for a moment about how it was -2 degrees the other night in Colorado? TWO BELOW, with howling winds. I like the beer, but man alive that makes for some cold sleeping.
All the golden loveliness of autumn is gone, and in its place we have this icy, silent cocoon all around us, luminescent and silvery-blue. Perhaps I just have to survive these next two weeks of school, and maybe go on a little cookie-baking binge, and then the season will feel like it is here. We are celebrating a very spartan (Little House On The Prairie-style) Christmas this year (everyone gets an orange, maybe a button). I am hoping that on the bright side it will make me remember, as Charlie Brown says, what Christmas is really all about.
I’m pleased to collate twenty-five songs for you, for late nights in December. Assembled together the last few evenings over generous glasses of BotaBox red wine and a happy heart (because really, what is more fun than making a seasonal mix?) — Merry Christmas and happy wintering to you all. I am thankful for you, and glad you read what I have to share; this is absolutely my utter favorite of these holiday mixes so far.
Now go get me the electric blanket; it’s on the couch.
October means we’re happily knee-deep in baseball, surrounded by seasonal pumpkin ales, and, regrettably, wrist-deep in the slimy insides of jack-o-lanterns. Music has been my quiet oasis. I figure it’s high time I stop futzing over my autumn mix and share it already.
The fall mix is one of my favorites to make. In addition to being generally hyperaware of everything around me in life, especially subtexts and undercurrents, I notice an acute sharpening of my senses every time the seasons change. It’s why I make you guys these seasonal mixes: as everything in the natural world around me transforms, I have this nerdy compulsion to soundtrack it, to sharpen that moment. Autumn for me often hits like a jetstream of melancholy, and I’ve found after listening to this mix a few times through that (coincidentally) many of these songs have themes of: bones, rivers, empty beds, and gospel backing vocals. Make of that what you will.
Suddenly the hedonistic humidity and verdant ease of summer is replaced, seemingly overnight, by a chill in the air that makes you take in a sharp and marvelous breath. Sweaters come out of the back of the closet and it becomes much harder to get out from underneath the down comforter in the morning. These are the songs for that.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost, Yale Review, Oct 1923
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY ::
THE FUEL/FRIENDS AUTUMN MIX 2011
The Wind – Cat Stevens
This is probably and very possibly the most perfect song ever written, coming in at under two minutes and sounding just exactly like twirling orange leaves drifting to the ground.
Do You Remember – Ane Brun
I picked this big song here because it boldly sounds to me the way that autumn looks - all vibrant and audacious, thumping right into your lush summer and startling it with crackly fiery colors. It sings of us finding the first position (ballet reference, i think) and every muscle resting, but also knowing it was the last time. You also must watch the video.
[thanks Dianna] Sorrow – Tyler Lyle
After posting the title track last month, “The Golden Age and The Silver Girl,” I cannot stop listening to this whole album. Seriously, you guys — it’s one of my favorite discoveries of the year. Tyler’s timbre and vulnerability in his voice when he climbs an octave at 2:45, over that longing banjo and strings, keeps killing me every time. If I could run away, I’d run away, drag you back to my bed / It’s the sweetest memories that hurt the worst in the end…
Always Gold – Radical Face
This is my favorite new song on this mix, and it speaks directly to the title of the mix/poem also. From the latest Radical Face album ‘The Family Tree: The Roots’, I love the way that Ben Cooper can weave stunning melody and woolly atmosphere together so effortlessly, with the warm shuffly handclaps and choirs of humming.
California – Iron & Wine
Sam Beam is the epitome of autumnal music, isn’t he? Along with Elliott Smith and Bob Dylan, he’s a seasonal prerequisite for me. This early demo somehow references both California and the Springsteen riff from “Glory Days,” in warm, slow tones. Never thought I’d see that pairing in a Sam Beam song, but I love it.
Kitchen – Vinyl Skyway
This song feels warmly burnished to me, and when those harmonies burst in all “oooooh”ing, it reminds me of Colorado Octobers, shot through with seriously gorgeous sunlight. Very Teenage-Fanclubby and golden nostalgic.
River Song One – Wooden Sky
I keep cueing this one up on repeat and just letting it play. No seriously, like fifteen times in a row. It’s a bittersweet slowburner of a song, from The Wooden Sky, out of Toronto. Thanks, Adam (who also has an ace fall mix).
Dark Turn Of Mind – Gillian Welch
The new album from Gillian is on constant repeat for me this season; it is amazing, as is she. I like the way this song wrestles with the shadows that unkind love can leave on our psyche (“I see the bones in the river”), but also the gentle embracing of those dark currents and how the nighttime is so lovely, and how the nightbirds sing so sweet. Haunting song.
When You Are Still (live on WNRN) – David Wax Museum
With this song that celebrates that welcome stillness that I rest in this time of year, the flawless harmonies of David Wax & Suz Slezak get their third consecutive seasonal appearance on my mixes this year, from spring to summer to now. This means I am listening to their album a heck of a lot, and also that there’s a variety on there that strikes me in just the right ways (reference: The Head and The Heart, the only other band I can remember featuring three seasons in a row). I chose this live version of the song since the album version doesn’t have Suz’s superb harmonies (that I like to sing along with).
The Ground We Stand On – Hawksley Workman
This is the third song that coincidentally ended up on this mix that speaks of climbing back in bed / too much space in my bed / too much now that’s vacant. Hmmm. First off: stop it, Autumn. Lay off. Secondly: perhaps it’s the awareness that happens as the temperatures start to drop — you want to spend more time huddled under the covers, but maybe you also realize with a sharp stab that you don’t necessarily want to do it alone. Hawksley’s Canadian. He gets it.
Years/Cleo’s Song – JBM
JBM is another artist that is just completely quintessentially an artist for the autumn time. Close your eyes and listen to this and tell me that all you can see is yellow aspen groves.
Open Air – Lemolo
These two ladies are from the Pacific Northwest and have known each other since they were kids, naming their band after a street in their childhood neighborhood. They completely blew everyone away in their sweaty yoga studio set at Doe Bay Fest this year (I’ve watched this video too many times). [Sidenote: in addition to being incredibly musically intuitive, drummer Kendra also made the raddest slip-and-slide accomplice that I've ever met. We rocked it at that fest, and had the brutal bruises to prove it.]
Ohio (Damien Jurado) – Strand of Oaks
Somehow Tim Showalter (Strand of Oaks) takes what is already a devastating song and makes it almost moreso, from that resigned opening sigh. I just found out that my paternal great-grandfather worked in the steel industry in Zanesville, Ohio (I’m totes claiming this song now), but we can all relate the the feeling of searching for a home, and wanting to come home. Been a long time.
[via]
Hope You Know – Megafaun
I still think this band would have the perfect name if they were very, very metal, but as you can hear here, they are not. But rad nonetheless, this track is from their new album on HomeTapes Records. The heavy, clear evocative resonance of piano also plays strongly throughout my fall mix this year.
At The Bird’s Foot – City and Colour
From the cowboy-sounding-but-actually-Canadian Dallas Green (City and Colour), this mysterious and gospelly song is about the burning fires of oil spills. I saw Dallas perform under gorgeous skies at Sasquatch this year, and I think his music sounds better with woodsmoke and October in the air.
Golden Days (acoustic) – The Damnwells
Me never featuring this on an autumn mix before is a grotesque, abhorrent oversight. God, I love this song, and this version somehow even improves on the original. It makes me long for things that haven’t even happened yet.
Into The River – Portage
More river imagery, more gospel voices rising strong. I think I need to go spend some time in a cabin (or a tent) by a powerful river again, before stuff starts freezing. Proclivities in my listening habits are trying to tell me something.
Northbound 35 – Jeffrey Foucault
Another song that should have been on every fall mix ever made since long ago. I am not sure if I’ve ever raved adequately about how much I love this song. Some days I will leave it on repeat and just sing along and feel that deep lingering sadness. This song seeps and burns. There are two lines that will always, always get me, no matter how many times I listen: “And we fought all night and we danced in your kitchen, you were as much in my hands as water or darkness or nothing could ever be held,” and “what’s beautiful is broken / and grace is just the measure of a fall.”
Things I Never Needed (acoustic) – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
This is a song about brutal realization of our shortcomings and a shedding of the things that we’d be better without. As such, it is a perfect soundtrack to this season and also works well for masochistic late nights. [video]
Hear The Noise That Moves So Soft and Low – James Vincent McMorrow
McMorrow gives me chills like Jeff Buckley and Bon Iver and Patrick Watson and other men who sing falsetto but are yet are fine specimens of men. His whole album is gorgeous and haunting.
I’m Losing Myself (featuring Ed Droste) – Robin Pecknold
The voices of Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear team up for a woodland autumnal spectacular. Lonely, darkly introspective, and self-damaging, this song is. “All alone at the end of the day I am just like the gathering fog.”
A Minor Place (Bonnie “Prince” Billy) – Fanfarlo
Fanfarlo takes a kicker of a song from Bonnie “Prince” Billy (oh wait, they’re all kickers from him) and make it their own during their iTunes Session. They’ve got a new album coming out too, and I am excited since I loved their debut thoroughly.
Lightning Rod – Drew Grow
I once heard Drew call “Friendly Fire” the saddest song he’s ever written, but I think this could be a runner-up. It’s a brave song. From last winter’s Comfort Feel EP.
The Loneliest Place I’ve Ever Been (Is In Your Arms) – Damien Jurado
The most wonderful thing about Damien is that I think he just pens songs this marvelous by the dozen and posts them on soundcloud, like a terrific overstock sale of heartbreak. I’ve been thinking of this song a lot lately, the bald-faced way he nudges “don’t you know / it’s time that we let go.” Yes. It is.
Graveyard – Feist
This is the track I’m stuck on the most on the terrific new Feist album, unable to get enough of the choir that swells all around in the later half of the song, “Whoa-ohh, bring it all back to life.” As it pertains to our seasonal wanderlusts, it’s just a reminder that after everything green dies, there’s gonna be the quiet icy silence, but someday all will be brought back to life.
To stream this year’s mix on 8tracks (for android users and other streamers), click here.
[cover image is of the tree outside my house, a gorgeous combination of red and gold / many many thanks again to Ryan Hollingsworth for the great graphic cover design!]
This morning, my car sits packed to its dear 2001 Sentra gills. I am heading off into the southwestern climes of the United States, across six states with my seven year-old, a stack of good music and audiobooks, and a hankering for the open road. We’ll hit Mesa Verde, see family in Phoenix, sun in San Diego, attend a Dodgers-Padres game (so I can teach him to properly boo LA), camp along the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and stay in various KOA cabins along the way. We plan on s’mores and stargazing, and maybe finding a swimming hole or two.
While I check out of here for that time, I’m leaving you all with my 2011 Summer Mix, which we will be rocking in the car (as long as the speakers hold). Consider this my out-of-office autoresponder. Now go outside and play.
SPILLING OUR ICE CUBES ON THE LAWN
The Fuel/Friends Summer 2011 Mix
Someone Else Can Make A Work Of Art – First Rate People
The first rule of summer is that of measured procrastination. Someone else can make a work of art; we’ll have our toes in the pool (“down to the water / where the water is cold”).
Constructive Summer – The Hold Steady “Me and my friends are like the drums on ‘Lust for Life’ / we pound it out on floor toms, our psalms are singalong songs….” – Some of the best opening lines of any album, ever, I’ve been waiting a few years to use this on a summer mix; I wanted it to get far removed enough from its original release (on the fabulous Stay Positive) so that the urgency and heat of young summers blazed through fresh. I love everything about this song. We’re gonna build something this summer.
Perfect Games – The Broken West
I took the title of the mix from this fantastic little forgotten gem of a song from the (I just learned now-defunct) Broken West, a great power-pop band that was signed to Merge Records. This was on 2008′s Now or Heaven, and it’s about kickin’ around, placing bets on the evening. I’ll bet on a summer evening anytime.
Rio – Hey Marseilles
There are always Brazilian boys to discover. Every line in this song makes it a perfect summer song: Drink til the morning becomes yesterday. Think of the shorelines you have yet to see / where the days left to breathe are not gone, are still long… Can’t wait to see Matt Bishop (hopefully) perform this at Doe Bay, under the August pines.
Singing The Devil’s Tune – Nick Jaina
This one gives off an anachronistic Elvis Perkins-y vibe, and starts with a lament about feet burned from dancing on your roof in the summer’s heat. It’s also the first of our hearty “la la la laaaa”s on this mix, because summer is for singing along (thanks Sean).
When They Fight, They Fight – The Generationals
I was surprised to find that this is a duo of guys from New Orleans, and not a doo-wop girl group with bouffants and pastel taffeta. In this instance, that is a very good thing.
Vocal Chords – Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr
Starting here like the Beach Boys and quickly toe-tapping their way into Paul Simon territory, this entire album is a glimmering summertime delight.
I Need A Dollar (Blogotheque version) – Aloe Blacc
…because most of us could use an extra dollar or two in the summertime. Aloe Blacc strips this song back to its spiritual traditional roots in a Paris cafe for his Blogotheque session, and it becomes a timeless acapella lament of the boss man and the price of artistry. And all he needs are foot-stomps, snaps, and some water-glass percussion.
Blackout – Pickwick
A bunch of white kids from Seattle reinvent themselves as makers of music infused with retro-60s soul, after falling for Sam Cooke (a noble path). 100% terrific as an accompaniment to watching the ripples of heat rise off the sidewalk.
Summer Home – Typhoon
Portland’s multi-membered Typhoon has been a magnificent constant for me since the Springtime. This one sings about childhood memories and how those halcyon summers always are especially cemented in our seasonal psyche.
My Body – Young The Giant
And then this one starts like an ignition turning over and I am excited for all the roadtrips we are collectively taking in these hot months, tires humming on the softening black asphalt.
Wonder Why – Vetiver
Alongside the Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr album, the new Vetiver album is my other summer soundtrack. This San Francisco outfit is on Sub Pop Records, and the album landed in my mailbox in May, just as the apple blossoms were getting their act together. The whole album sounds real nice with the windows down, and I can’t stop listening.
Cold Feet – Lost Lander
This Portland band was featured on the PDX Pop Now! compilation, and sounds wildly Celtic to me, a voice ululating about a million tiny flashlights over a gently growing sonic gleam. It’s addictive. (oh — Kickstart them!)
Demons (live on Daytrotter) – AgesandAges
Even though I know this happened in a rad studio in Rock Island, Illinois, I think it sounds just like it could have been around a campfire somewhere on a coast, embers floating off into the salty air, hands clapping in time.
North of Town – Bryan John Appleby
Another stunner from BJA’s debut EP, this one has a jubilant streak in it that made it one of the highlights of his live show, as we all clapped and “la la laaaa”d together with a wish to run off to the north of town. Also, since we last spoke, BJA reached his Kickstarter goal! Yeehaw.
The Least I Can Do – David Wax Museum
I saw David Wax Museum a few months ago in Denver and this was one of the most stunning songs they did, about hearts opening up like flowers and not being able to unbloom. And that is such a good thing.
Let’s Go Down – Family Of The Year
I first wrote about this song back in January with teeth chattering, just envisioning campfires on the beach, and now it’s here. “First we take our shoes off, then we take our socks off, it doesn’t even matter – there are rocks that we can jump off…” My anthem these days.
Slipping Through The Sensors – Fruit Bats
I love the permeating, fresh-green laziness all through this whole damn song. I’ve thought of this as the quintessential summer song for a few years now.
Peaceful Mind – Ryan Tanner
This song by some Salt Lake City friends slides into the mix laden with a simple warm grace, like a benediction. I could listen to this one over and over and gain a new measure of peace each time. It also features Paul Jacobsen on banjo and backing vocals – you guys really really liked his cover of Kathleen Edwards that I posted once. This is a summer twilight song to me, fireflies flickering.
I rode my bike to work this morning against the winds, and noticed a yellow crocus has bloomed in my front yard since I last looked. Pretty soon I will plant my garden, and for the first time in a long time last week I fell asleep with the window opened to the sound of warm rain.
For all the pristine icy clean of winter, the hearth of a fire, the months for introspection, I am thrilled at the thaw. I’ve been squirreling away songs for this spring mix since January, in an act of hope that warmer days were indeed on the horizon. For most of us, those days are here (in fits and starts, but trying and that’s what counts).
I’ve put together a mix of the fresh bright music that is soundtracking my season. Lots of new stuff, lots of aural joy and hope for regrowth. Let’s relish what we have.
USED HEARTS / FRESH STARTS ::
THE FUEL/FRIENDS SPRINGTIME 2011 MIX
Born With A Broken Heart – David Wax Museum
The title for this mix gets its namesake from Boston’s David Wax Museum, when they sing here that “some of us come with new hearts; most of us come with used hearts / baby why do you look so sad?.” Against a shiny cavalcade of mariachi-worthy brass and handclaps, this is an assertion that our used hearts can do just fine together in the new year.
Look Good In Leather – Cody Chestnutt
Track two here was chosen because every season needs at least one song that you have to dance to whenever it comes on. Cody offers us a secret for the springtime, it seems — looking good in leather (who knew), and superb albums like The Headphone Masterpiece, which I just discovered about nine years late. Heck. So. good.
CPR – Claws Part 2 – Typhoon
The entire new album from Portland’s Typhoon may be the most perfect spring soundtrack ever; definitely on heavy rotation this month. This melodic, orchestral song weaves and builds slowly (over handclaps!), telling the story of one who sold everything that they didn’t want, and what they couldn’t sell they gave away. It’s part of why Craigslist is so popular in the springtime (well, that and Missed Connections, obv).
Yer Spring – Hey Rosetta!
This song starts quietly restrained, the “fucking around in the dark,” as they sing. It ends with rising up, and the explosive redemption of a full choir, like you walked into a cathedral and they were all singing for you. Reminiscent of fellow Canadians Arcade Fire, but with their own dazzling wash of color and joy.
Crop Circles Plus Legs – Like Pioneers
Clocking in at under two minutes, this primal song from Chicago’s Like Pioneers gives me what I want, and then stops before I’m sated. Sometimes it is good to be left hanging.
I’ll Be Around (feat Timbaland) – Cee-Lo
Earlier this year, Nick Hornby sent me this song as part of a delectable mix that’s way funkier than I claim to be capable of, when left to my own devices. I was walking around Minneapolis when I first listened to the opening lyrics here, and not only did I yelp out loud, I decided it was one of the greatest rhymes/opening lines ever penned. This song is also very good for the seasonal dancing and/or strutting.
Everyday – Vetiver
Simply put, one of the sunniest damn songs ever recorded.
Awake My Soul / Réveille mon âme – Mumford & Sons
Last summer after the splendor of Telluride, I discovered this humble French version of “Awake My Soul,” in a blooming Parisian courtyard. Since spring is about awakening, this works for me on the mix, x1000.
Bright Lit Blue Skies – Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
I love how this Ariel Pink song sounds like it could soundtrack a groovy chase scene in a late Sixties episode of Batman. Bam! Pow!
Beautiful Lie – Ivan & Alyosha
Seattle’s Ivan & Alyosha wowed me at SXSW, and weave a slightly psychedelic pop sound that reminds me of Cotton Mather, a very good thing.
The World’s Greatest (R. Kelly cover) – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
I can’t stop listening to this cover lately; I am including it mostly because of the lyric about “I’m that little bit of hope, with my back against the ropes.” That’s a perfect metaphor for Spring, ain’t it?
Simple Girl – Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr
Spring needs whistling.
Are You Lightning? – Nada Surf
One of the best things about spring is the colossal thunder and lightning storms. Meteorological craziness, unhinged and beautiful and free. From my favorite Nada Surf album, this gorgeous gem asks “Are you lightning? Cuz I’m waiting.” This song (and this album) will forever remind me of the timid, terrifying beauty in new starts.
Cuyahoga (R.E.M. cover) – The Decemberists
The Decemberists take on one of my favorite old R.E.M. songs in the studio at KCRW, an ode to skinned knees and river beds, with a jangle that feels just right.
Tear The Fences Down – Eulogies
From their new album by the same name, Eulogies sing here about “Colorado snow, just a memory.” We know it’s returning by October, but for now let’s focus on the new green growing things.
Oslo Campfire – Port O’Brien
There’s a hazy nordic ebb throughout this Port O’Brien song that seemed to fit on this mix. I have a firepit outside my house, and this spring I am dedicated to the idea of using it more often. I love the smell of campfires, even moreso the next morning when my hair still smells like it.
No Time for Dreaming – Charles Bradley
For many of us, the freshness of spring is the perfect time for dreamin’. 62-year-old Brooklyn cook-turned-soul-singer Charles Bradley has no time for that, he sings. Why? Because he’s gotta get on up and do his thing. Fair enough, Charles. Totally fair use of springtime. Golden State – Delta Spirit
This one’s in here because a) Delta Spirit’s new album rocks and b) it’s a piano-pounding homage to my home state, where springtime doesn’t just arrive, it explodes. “These roads stretch a thousand miles…” and I want to see all of them.
Early Morning Rain (Gordon Lightfoot) – Paul Weller
Rain, rain, rain. I love everything about it, especially the smell. In Colorado we really only see rain in the springtime and then pretty much every afternoon in July. Weller’s voice here is so rich, as he sings of early morning rain, airplanes, travel, and pinging around far from home. After a busy spring of travel, this is a song I’ve listened to dozens of times in the past weeks, usually while I’m waiting on an airplane to take off.
Snow Is Gone – Josh Ritter
I have to close with this song; have to. It is the quintessential springtime song. There’s a live version from 2003 of Josh doing this song on KCRW, and he introduces it by explaining that it is “about how you’re rooting for spring as the home team.” Sometimes I listen to this in the cold months, just to remind me what’s coming, and what’s now here.
Five years ago I moved out of the San Francisco Bay Area for the snowy, crisp mountains of Colorado. I absolutely love my adopted home, our vibrant music scene, and the fresh air here, but no foolin’ I do often long for my hometown hills.
Over the holidays I went to San Francisco for a week to stay at the Noe Valley apartment of friends who were out of town and graciously let me “housesit.” It was a part of town I had never stayed in before. When I first let myself into their empty place on Christmas evening, and walked out to their deck, I took in a sharp breath and smiled.
The first picture below is the desktop image I’ve had on my computer for the last two years, to remind me of my homeland:
…then these two are photos I took on Christmas from the deck where I was staying:
Same hill, same view as the one I’d been looking at daily for the last two years. It’s smile-inducing moments of kismet like that which reassure me no matter how far I roam from Pacific coast, it will keep finding me.
It finds me lately in the music that celebrates the Bay Area; I started this mix to accompany my recent trip, finishing it up after that view happened on into my life. These are songs with references to all the favorite, special parts of California that helped catalyze bits of me – loosely centered around San Francisco, San Jose, and places you can (and I did) drive to in an afternoon with some friends and a picnic basket.
16th And Valencia Roxy Music – Devendra Banhart
Right on the edge of the Mission District, by the hundred-year-old artsy Roxie Theater, Devendra is taking us out to find our lovers tonight. Oh, and they’re gonna be riding six white horses and wearing pressed blue jeans, he suggests. But hey, this is SF. Go with it.
Piazza, New York Catcher – Belle & Sebastian
Not at all about NYC, but the story of a love affair set throughout the city of San Francisco, hanging about the stadium where the Giants and Mets will play, the Tenderloin, borrowed bedrooms virginal and spare. Meet you at the statue in an hour.
California On My Mind – Wild Light
Something a reader recommended for this mix, this is absolutely one of my favorite new songs, even if the core songwriting lyric is a repeated refrain of “fuck today, fuck San Francisco, fuck California” with a “…fuck Oakland” thrown in later for good measure. The rousing harmonica and the charmingly awkward vocals are enough to win me, and I’m sure we’ve done enough jerky things to deserve a little rancor.
San Jose – Joe Purdy
I never knew this song when I lived in San Jose (my address was always a San Jose one except for when I was in college, when it moved over a few zip codes) but it sounds like a warm, Ray LaMontagne-style blues & organ song that I’ve just always known.
Roots Radical – Rancid
“Took the 60 bus out of downtown Campbell, Ben Zanotto he was on there, he was waiting for me.” Campbell’s border is about a mile from the edge of my high school, and Rancid had origins at the neighboring high school. I totally took the 60 bus to Great America amusement park, and I also wonder if Ben Zanotto’s dad was the same guy who started the neat Zanotto’s grocery markets in town, like a prototype Trader Joe’s.
(Wake Me Up) In San Francisco – The Welcome Matt
I fittingly first heard this on a sampler from the epic KFOG radio station, and it always makes me smile, especially if I can listen to it as the song suggests, while driving in over the Bay Bridge, or landing in SFO on a big jet plane. This song namechecks so many great places, as it talks about how going home never gets old.
San Francisco – Brett Dennen
Brett is from the Central California town of Oakdale, between Escalon and Jamestown on 108, a route I have driven often enough to see why he pictures himself buying a navy peacoat and moving to SF. This is such a charming love letter to the city, we’ll allow him to be on this mix even though he is an Oakland A’s fan: “Over in the Mission it’s always a sunny day / there’s a real good baseball town but my team is across the Bay.”
Hail Mary – Pomplamoose
Not only is this husband-wife duo from Corte Madera (north of SF), but this catchy pop tune sings of driving down to San Jose at ninety miles per hour, has clattery, stick-in-your-head percussion, and their band name is modeled after the French word for grapefruit. What’s not to like?
Santa Clara – The National
Santa Clara is where I went to college and then worked for five years, and where my grandma still lives in the same house on Brannan Place that she’s been in for 50 years — so I was pretty excited to find this National b-side. It is gorgeous by any standards, even aside from how it hits the home parts of my heart.
Snow In San Anselmo – Van Morrison
Van gets a bit meandering here on this seven+ minute tune, but it feels appropriate for the kind of cold night he describes in this small town in Marin County, across the Golden Gate from SF. “The classic music station plays soft and low . . . and the pancake house is always open 24 hours a day / my waitress said it was coming down, said it hadn’t happened in over thirty years.” I remember snow maybe once in all my years in the Bay Area, and this song is mighty evocative.
San Geronimo – Red House Painters
Then just along the boulevard from San Anselmo is the town of San Geronimo, where Kozelak sings of “somewhere up fifteen miles sifting through crackling vinyl / lost memories of my youth are coming into view… weekend in San Geronimo, love how the starlit skies show.” Red House Painters were from San Francisco, so they get double point placement on this mix for that. They know the landscape well, and I could have picked any number of their tunes but this one is special.
California, Pt. 2 – Mason Jennings
Possibly my favorite of all Mason Jennings songs, about packing a box of books and a guitar into the back of a pickup and moving to CA — not Los Angeles (“I’m staying far away from there”) but moving “north of San Francisco into the cleaner air / I’m gonna get a little land with the money I’ve saved, buy a little house that I can work on / where the next nearest neighbor lives miles away, I’ll never have to mow the lawn. Right on.” Sounds absolutely perfect to me.
El Caminos In The West – Grandaddy
Jason Lytle is from Modesto, California, and so even though I realize this song may well be about the stylin’ car the El Camino, I prefer to imagine it as singing about the El Camino Real, the King’s Highway that stretches the length of the state and used to bind together all the mission churches in the state’s earliest days.
Palo Alto – Radiohead
With bleeps and bloops fitting the technological mecca this “city of the future” has become (from Hewlett Packard to Facebook) Radiohead sings an ode to Palo Alto with a pervasive feeling of alienation. But I mean, seriously, Radiohead wrote a song about them. They can’t complain.
Oakland on a Rainy Day – Jake Troth
This Bay Area songwriter writes great, humble, satisfying songs and this is no exception. There’s nearly nothing I love more than Oakland (or San Francisco, or San Jose, or Santa Cruz) on a rainy day. When I was in SF over the holidays, it poured on Tuesday night and I just opened the windows and sat in the dark and listened and smelled that rain smell. We don’t get that in Colorado much.
27th Ave Shuffle – Foxboro Hot Tubs
A 2008 side project of seminal Berkeley band Green Day, this song rocks us down 27th Avenue (which bisects Golden Gate Park and runs on up through the Richmond) and I think references jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge which of course is something we do not recommend. But this song, yes.
Rendezvous Potrero Hill – Architecture in Helsinki
Let’s pause for a little autumnal instrumental interlude dedicated to this San Francisco neighborhood, home to both Anchor Steam Brewery and the Mythbusters folks, so you know it has to be good.
Grace Cathedral Hill – The Decemberists
A new year’s day spent in this, one of SF’s most gorgeous cathedrals, lighting little white candles and then heading north to the Hyde Street Pier — “And the world may be long for you, but it’ll never belong to you / but on a motorbike when all the city lights blind your eyes tonight, are you feeling better now?” Yup.
Highway 101 – Social Distortion
One of our most maddening or beautiful highways, depending on which stretch of it you find yourself on, and what time to day. I picked this song over Albert Hammond Jr’s “Back To The 101″ because everyone knows that only Southern Californians add the “the.”
Moon Over Marin – Dead Kennedys
One of San Francisco’s most famous punk bands sing about pollution in the North Bay, decades before the Cosco Busan spill. The band was formed after guitarist East Bay Ray saw a punk/ska show at San Francisco’s legendary Mabuhay Gardens, met Jello Biafra and the rest of the band, and yelled their way into our city’s history.
Got To Have It – Soul President
From the Numero Group’s marvelous Eccentric Soul re-release series, this steel drum-peppered track was originally put out on a tiny San Francisco imprint Uptight Records in the ’60s. There’s all kind of painfully funky shoutouts here to the Haight Ashbury, laced liberally with “unh!”s. Being this cool hurts.
The Chapter of Your Life Entitled San Francisco – The Lucksmiths
This Australian band laments a friend who has moved off to our temperate Bay Area climes, and won’t even write postcards home during the long summer, so taken is she with the charms of the city by the Bay. It happens.
Santa Cruz (You’re Not That Far) – The Thrills
One thing I probably miss the most here in the landlocked square I now call home is the inability to pack up the car with a few essentials and drive south over Highway 17 to Santa Cruz, the beachtown that was once so close and so appreciated. The Thrills are from nowhere near California (Dublin, actually) but the first two songs on their 2002 album So Much For The City talk about California coastal towns so convincingly, you’d think they were from here too.
Big Dipper – Cracker
David Lowery’s earlier band Camper Van Beethoven was centered in Santa Cruz, and this melancholy song compares life to entering the long tunnel and the curve leading into the iconic Big Dipper, the wooden rollercoaster at the Beach Boardwalk (from the top you can “see Monterey, or think about San Jose”). I know it well. Lowery also sings of sitting on the Cafe Zinho steps, an ’80s landmark which was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and watching all the world go by.
San Andreas Fault – Natalie Merchant
Speaking of destruction caused by the ’89 quake, this fault is the meeting of the plates that caused it. I was ten and I was begrudgingly cleaning my room so that I could join the rest of my family in watching the World Series Game 3 that was starting, Giants vs A’s in a cross-the-Bay pairing. This video of the baseball coverage that night makes me smile to see old Candlestick full, but remembering how sunny that day was makes my stomach hurt.
San Francisco Blues – Stephen Fretwell
I’ve loved Fretwell since I first heard the devastatingly perfect “Emily,” and even moreso when he put this song on his 2007 album Man On The Roof. Originally from Manchester, England, he joins a long line of Brits who have fallen in love with the city.
California Brown and Blue – Denison Witmer
Everything about this song cuts me, we’ll just leave it at that. “Weightless in the arms of the Golden Gate… I leave before we find out what it means.”
Sausalito - Conor Oberst
Conor pens a rollicking number with deceptively wrenching lyrics set in the gorgeous seaside town of Sausalito, which I remember a specific gorgeous March day spent walking around in after taking the ferry up from SF. “Hair blowing in the hot wind, time hanging from a clothespin…” He thinks we should move to a houseboat and let the ocean rock us back and forth to sleep. Yes.
(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay (ripped from vinyl) – Otis Redding
Perhaps one of the most famous songs written in and about our Bay (other than, you know, Journey), Otis penned this one night on a houseboat docked in that same Sausalito, while he was in town to play San Francisco’s famous Fillmore. Everything about that sentence, I love.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t cry or smile widely (sometimes at the same time) while making this mix.
[help on this mix from several friends from the Bay Area, including pal/SF resident/musician Matt Nathanson, Ken Shipley of Numero Group and my high school, Rand Foster of Long Beach’s epic Fingerprints Record Store and neighboring rival high school,and fellow SF blogger Adrian who also rocked some of the best suggestions on the Stomp/Clap Mix. Y’all do your city proud.]
Despite a somewhat peculiar lack of snow so far this December, I went ahead tonight and made myself a White Russian and felt very mysterious (like the kind of girl who makes herself White Russians on a quiet Sunday evening) and sifted through my favorite seasonal music by the twinkling tree for this year’s Christmasy/wintry mix.
As I say every year, and as we are reminded in every lonely drugstore and crowded mall, there is a colossal amount of craptastic holiday music that should never be played again, ever. Synthesizers, no. Chipmunks, no. Every year I wonder if I will be able to find enough good new songs to use for a complete mix of meaningful, pensive, spirited Christmas music. Every year find that with some searching and selective culling, I can.
This year’s mix ranges from the brand-new to quite-old melodies, but all are road tested by yours truly, and I hope they add a pleasing lilt to your holiday celebrations. Last month marked five years of Fuel/Friends, and this is a little year-end gift to you all. Thank you for reading and listening.
I’ve been unabashedly reveling in every morning where we evade the chill for one more day, where I can ride my bike to work in a skirt and short sleeve shirt, where I can sit on the porch after dinner and not feel that mercury drop and the gooseflesh form. But hey — all that stopped early this week, with a final burst of indian summer and the subsequent autumn arrival. Time for scarves and cider and music that makes me feel thoughtful, wistful, warm.
Once the inspiration hit, this mix was almost harder than the summer mix I made. Summer mixes are all about toe-tapping fun and driving around with the windows down, singing along at full volume. In examining my iTunes library, I realized that perhaps I am drawn intrinsically, year-round to this sort of autumnal music, those songs with heft and subtle strength and acoustic coziness, maybe of the hippie beards-and-sweaters variety.
As much as I love the hot days of summer, I do look forward to the quiet introspection of fall.
AUTUMN LEAVES, AUTUMN STAYS: THE FUEL/FRIENDS FALL 2010 MIX
One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) – Bob Dylan
Because, for me, there’s no other artist that evokes autumn for me as thoroughly and immediately as Dylan. The organ crescendo in this song feels like an October carnival, exploding with caramel apples and the smell of leaves burning.
Slow Dance – Coco et Co.
This duo from Montreal has woven together a rich and gorgeous album, the sparse iciness of melody here anchored by the warm Springsteenesque timbre of Andrew Sisk and the interwoven frost of Miranda Durka. It’s autumn and winter in one song. You can get their album here for $5.
Down In The Valley – The Head And The Heart
I cannot say enough good things about these guys. This song from their self-titled debut (easily one of my favorites of the year) is steeped in referential nods to all sorts of old, good country songs and emanates a road-weary ennui. The violin also breaks my heart. I’m presenting their Nov 5th show in Denver: stay tuned for a ticket giveaway next week!
The Gospel Song – Magnet
Magnet (Even Johansen) warms his native Norway nights with this substantial stomping, clapping, banjo-laced gem.
All Through Montana – John Craigie
Remember that warm seeping feeling in your chest when you first listened to the magnificent slow burn of “Orange Sky“? This song (from San Francisco songwriter John Craigie) infuses a distinctly Western-landscape haze into that sensation. I love this song.
Bare Bones and Branches – Lewis & Clarke
One original review of this album in ’03 called it “the perfect autumnal album.” I agree.
Sold – Dan Mangan
This gorgeous, smart album and Dan’s oaky, warm voice have been a major part of my last few months and I don’t plan to stop.
The Void – Jay Farrar & Ben Gibbard
This atmospheric song from the Kerouac-inspired ode from Gibbard and Farrar makes me taste fog and smell pine trees on the California coast.
Sin-Eaters (b-side) – The National
A tremendous b-side from the expanded version of High Violet (coming next month), all tension and velvet. This feels to me like a preface to the sadness of “Runaway.”
Five Years Coming – Cataldo
A small, bright spot of sunshine through the grey clouds: “the simple songs of hope I wrote have always been my best.”
Si, Paloma – Sun Kil Moon
A reader suggested this intricate instrumental as the perfect fall song and I concur.
Burning Stars – Mimicking Birds
This Portland trio crafts lo-fi, compelling music that I love. Fittingly recorded in a bedroom, as a home demo.
Transformation (live at eTown) – David Gray
David Gray has always felt like an October artist to me (or maybe January, but that’s another mix altogether). This melancholy piano song is fitting for this time of year when everything is being transformed by the chill.
What We Gained In The Fire – The Mynabirds
This Saddle Creek band recorded their stellar debut album with lots of whiskey and dancing in an Oregon hillside cabin. That sounds like an excellent fall weekend.
Passing Afternoon – Iron & Wine
“Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made / And she’s chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings / Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves.” Autumn isn’t autumn without Iron & Wine, yes?
Come Talk To Me (Peter Gabriel) – Bon Iver
Or Bon Iver as well? This cover is from the Record Store Day split 7″ I bought and have surely worn a groove in by now, a slow and haunting cover, with plucking banjo that sounds for all the world like rain on a tin roof.
Paint a Face – Neil Halstead
An acoustic folk album full of slow-reveal hues from this former Slowdive frontman, this was one of my favorites of 2008 and I always pull it out when the leaves start to change.
Helpless (live) – Neil Young
“There is a town in north Ontario”…. sweet jesus, talk about the high and lonesome sound — I think that tinkling piano with the piercing lone harmonica together at around 3:00 on this live version just about does me in for good. “Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise / Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes….”
Rambling Man – Laura Marling
Like a wise Joni Mitchell in fresh 20-year-old skin, Laura Marling wows the socks off me.
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight (Beatles) – Mumford & Sons
I can go for the Mumford & Sons sound any time of year, but they are coming to Denver at the end of this month and I am looking forward to it as a contender for show of this season (their Telluride one surely was for summer).
Storm Window (John Prine) – Josh Ritter
Folk perfection, the musical marriage of these two. “I can hear the wheels of the automobiles so far away, just moving along through the drifting snow / It’s times like these when the temperatures freeze, I sit alone just looking at the world through a storm window.” [bonus]
Post-War – M. Ward
One of the most perfect “slow-dance in stocking feet, finish your whiskey while you rest your head on my chest” songs that M. Ward has ever written.
It All Comes Right (Doe Bay Session) – Drew Grow & The Pastors’ Wives
This is one of my new favorite bands, and this singalong version of the closing track on their scuzzy, gospelly, phenomenally-good debut album is everything I want in music. Stay tuned this week for details of a house show I am throwing with them on November 4th!
This year marks the most fun I’ve had yet putting together twenty songs to soundtrack your summer. The mix came together organically and joyfully while I did summery things, and the contentment I feel lately in these weeks is embedded in the picks. I declared on January 1 (when I did the Polar Bear Plunge) that 2010 was going to be a flippin’ fantastic year, full of new experiences — and it certainly is living up to the promise.
Enjoy these as I have, play them at the BBQs to come, and burn them on CD for your next trip to the beach. Bring enough firewood; don’t forget the sunscreen and the fuzzy blankets. Summer is here.
FUEL/FRIENDS SUMMER PLUNGE 2010
Bullet – Scarlett Johansson & Steel Train
I adore the two drastically different versions of this song so much that I am declaring them the anthems of my summer, and bookending this year’s mix with them. Starting this mix with ScarJo? Yeah, I’m as shocked as you are. This is actually a cover of the original (see track 19) from an album of all-female covers (Tegan & Sara, Amanda Palmer). When Scarlett croons over that immense, filthy-crunchy beat that she fell in love on the back seat of your car, can you blame her?
Bang Pop – Free Energy
Another song I want to listen to all summer: 100% pure bottled fun from these Philadelphia chaps — like Mentos in a bottle of Coke.
The Diamond Church Street Choir – The Gaslight Anthem
Snapping on the street corner because it’s too hot to go inside? A song that’s all at once immediate and urgent, as well as timeless, from these Jersey boys’ third album. “While I’m just waiting on the light to change / and the steam heat pours from the bodies on the floor.”
Heard It On The Radio – The Bird and The Bee
The lone original on an album of shiny Hall & Oates covers, it’s the standout tune for me, since I could never abide Hall & Oates anything. It perfectly encapsulates those summer crushes soundtracked to that one song on the radio all through August.
Heart To Tell – The Love Language This North Carolina band (on Merge Records, one of my favorites) has a poppy, effusive, beat-driven sound that fits perfectly in these months. They kind of reminded me of Voxtrot, before Voxtrot stopped trotting.
Kiola Beach – HOT SPA
I know nothing about this band except they made a wonderful video with this song and old home movie footage of beach trips and vintage surfing. That’s enough for me to have a permanently fabulous vision in my mind for this song. They’re Australian, unsigned, and I read about them here.
The Drying Of The Lawns – The Tallest Man On Earth
On last year’s summer mix, Kristian Matsson sang to us about bluebirds flying away, and this year it’s the drying of summer lawns, and waves, rivers, and mirages. I’ve spent the interim twelve months falling completely in love with him, because of songs like this.
Fairweather – Houses
The cover art picture above was taken by my friend Kinsey, the luminous woman in the Denver band Houses. As I was clicking through a few of her quintessentially-summer pictures online, showing a bunch of folks up at Echo Lake lounging on huge boulders in the sun, this song of theirs (from their Summer EP last year) came on randomly. And it was perfect: let’s leave this town behind, let’s go for a drive.
Lost In My Mind – The Head and The Heart
What’s summer if not a little time out of mind? This song shimmers and grows slowly, to the crescendo where the bass drum starts softly thumping, and it sings about the stars all coming out at night. It’s almost like that Fanfarlo track I loved last year, that helped me actually see the way the sky illuminates at twilight, one tiny pinprick of light at a time. I’ve been massively loving The Head and The Heart since I posted that song last week (their full-length album is just out this week). They also remind me delightfully of the Local Natives, if you love them as I do. I Will Be The Sun – Old Canes
Windchimes and hard-driving clattery percussion that you can dance around to, and this one sails right into the summer mix. The whole Feral Harmonic album sounds this joyous, and I love it. Great for roadtrips and gratuitous steering-wheel drumming.
Black and Milds – Cataldo
My criteria for summer is often a rubric of what songs might sound good sung around a bonfire, if I had exceptionally talented friends who played the banjo as well as they drank. We’ve also got plenty of handclaps here, in this song about missing someone (which surely we all do on occasion, even in the summer). Thanks Katie!
Hard Sun – Indio
The original version of the sweeping epic song from Canadian Gordon Peterson in 1989. Featuring Joni Mitchell on background vocals and an assortment of exotic African-sounding instruments, it just feels radiant.
Flaming Arrow – Jupiter One
NYC’s Jupiter One is a duo with folksy roots and Seventies AM radio leanings. This song is all lemondrops and summer street strolls, over lyrics about burning buildings. What an odd, totally successful juxtaposition.
Unattainable – Little Joy
Man, this entire album is the perfect summer accompaniment — that slightly kitschy, clattery sound from Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti and vocalist Binki Shapiro, along with Brazilian musician Rodrigo Amarante. I had a hard time picking just one track off this album for the mix.
Mirando – Ratatat
The video for this Brooklyn duo’s 2008 song consist of clips from Predator in reverse, so this song feels a bit like humid jungle warfare to me, in some exotic land. But, you know — humid jungle warfare you can dance to.
In The Summertime (acoustic) – Rural Alberta Advantage
I discovered this in the cold of November, and have been waiting for the sun to come and warm things up enough to enjoy it the way I think it was meant to be heard. A bittersweet, piercing, perfect little song, recorded off-the-cuff backstage at the Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco.
Sunny Sunday Mill Valley Groove Day – The Sir Douglas Quintet
My friend Nick from London said I had to put this on the mix, and when he recommends, I listen. I’d never heard this before but it feels like something captured on a warm afternoon in the studio when the recorder was accidentally kept running. “When there’s nothing left to say, and all the clouds have faded away / And my mind wanders out there across the bay…”
Saturday Night (Pinkhearts session) – Ryan Adams
My friend Brian from San Francisco said I had to put this on the mix, and when he recommends, I listen. There’s something in the aimlessness and lazy midnight humidity of this song that sounds like a perfect summer night when you were a teenager. Also, the saxophone makes it sound for all the world like a cast-off demo from the Rolling Stones.
Bullet – Steel Train
Indie kids doing their best, brilliant shot at Springsteen. As soon as I burn this mix onto a CD, I am hitting the road with the windows open because holy heck how good will this song sound on a summer night with the car windows down?? It’s so good that I had to use this song twice on the mix. My new favorite summer song of 2010. [huge thanks to Brian in Portland!!]
Pursuit of Happiness (Kid CuDi cover) – Lissie
Finally, this one – I love Lissie, and I love how she had to take a shot of tequila before she covers hip-hop artist Kid CuDi’s collaboration with MGMT and Ratatat: “2am, summer night / Hands on the wheel — uh, uh, fuck that….” Ending on a perfect, if dangerous, note.
My favorite songs are the ones you feel in your bones, the ones that bubble up effervescently with that passion which has to explode out your extremities in the form of claps, stomps, and other forms of bodily percussion.
A few months ago, fellow blogger Adrian and I started knocking around the idea of a Stomp/Clap mix with all the best samples of these songs. This has been an absolute joy to assemble (with suggestions from you guys) and is the perfect late-Spring soundtrack. While everything outside is coming back to life, these songs are the essence of vibrancy and propulsive joy.
They range all over the map, from the old Delta blues of Son House, to Frightened Rabbit from Scotland (my favorite song on their new album), to the fantastic version from Brooklyn’s Elizabeth & The Catapult covering Leonard Cohen. There’s the song from Good Old War that kept me going all winter with its hopeful lyrics about birds up in the sky (and I thought of those words when a flock of seagulls soared silently over my head on the beach Saturday evening), and the Joshua James tune still frequently finds itself on repeat in my car for a dozen times or more.
The handclap + stomp combination was the earliest way that we humans punctuated our songs and kept our beats, and the preponderance of newer artists on this mix heartens me. Music is joyful again.
THE FUEL/FRIENDS STOMP-CLAP MIX
(This one’s so massive, I’m calling it a Double-CD/Gatefold LP supermix)
I recently made a different mix for a drummer friend of mine, all based around songs with percussion I love — and I think this mix just eclipsed it. This might be my favorite new mix ever.
So. Despite my general disdain for television, I kinda might have sorta gotten addicted to Friday Night Lights. It happens, on occasion, when an exceptionally good show crosses my path, and even moreso when it has an ace soundtrack. At the urging of several friends with really good musical taste, I began gorging myself on the first three seasons on DVD right around Thanksgiving and I’m just catching up. The best I can explain, in its finest moments, this show feels like a Springsteen song in small towns and the fires of youth, all come to life in Texas.
The soundtrack is impressive. I’ve had to watch each episode with my laptop nearby because I do an excessive amount of lyrical-snippet Googling and message board trolling (nerd!) to find all the deep cuts and covers and quirky songs the music directors have chosen. Whoever they are, I love them. If you’ve never watched the show (I thought it was lame for years) take a gander at the soundtracking and you might change your mind. The songs fit perfectly, and then once you start watching, you and I can have conversations about Tim Riggins. Trust me.
Since I enjoy making mixes for occasions, heading to SXSW tomorrow (via aereo this year, sadly, not roadtripping like that one amazing time last year) makes this new mix sound even more satisfying. These are all songs that have been played on the first three seasons of the show. If you happen to be driving down to Texas this week, do me a solid and burn this to enjoy on the way.
Name: Heather Browne Location: Colorado, originally by way of California Giving context to the torrent since 2005.
"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel." —Hunter S. Thompson
Mp3s are for sampling purposes, kinda like when they give you the cheese cube at Costco, knowing that you'll often go home with having bought the whole 7 lb. spiced Brie log. They are left up for a limited time. If you LIKE the music, go and support these artists, buy their schwag, go to their concerts, purchase their CDs/records and tell all your friends. Rock on.
Name: Heather Browne
