Soundtrack for a Perfect Day

Yeah, so for some reason the Blogger software robots determined that this might be a spam blog, and prevented me from posting to it for about five days in total. I had to put in a request for a human to look at the blog and verify that it was not spam to get publishing capability back again. When I clicked on the link to find out what a "spam blog" might be, I read:

"The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text..."

I'm trying not to feel slighted.

Things have been busy as usual in the past week, but not too much interesting to write about. The Buck 65 song-learning and rehearsing process has begun. Some of the material is quite simple, but there's a lot of it and we're leaving for Texas a week from Monday, so I'm getting a little anxious about it. Once there we have a day to rehearse with Rich for the first and only time, and also with the Texan pedal steel player who's been hired to accompany us. Should be verrrrry interesting.

Song-building has also been continuing with Charles and Cliff. We already have jammed out a fair amount of tunage, and now have to start imposing some structure and, the most dreaded part, writing some lyrics. Hopefully it will be a process of each implying things about the other in a bootstrapping fashion.

The weather's been really mild here all week, then yesterday we got a huge blizzard up from Ontario. Everyone locked themselves away with movies, and then today the sun immediately came out and melted everything. It's been an absolutely gorgeous day. People are out everywhere with big grins on. And I guess there's a lunar eclipse tonight. Very excitin'.

Somewhere in there Ali and I watched The U.S. vs. John Lennon. It was great — informative and inspirational. There was tons of footage of John and Yoko I'd never seen before.

We got a phone call from our friend Tim in Toronto on I think it was Monday night. We haven't talked to him in a long time and it was really nice to hear from him. Now he and I have started up a game of email chess, which should be good for a cerebral laugh.

Our other friend from Toronto, Matt, is back in Halifax for an extended stay while he does some sort of journalism internship at the Chronicle Herald. Haven't heard from him yet, but we're super excited to hang out with him.

This may seem sillly, but the most exciting thing for me recently has been putting together a couple of mix tapes (actually CDs, but "mix tape" just sounds way cooler; I sort of wish they really were tapes, as I could have gotten the volume levels of different songs more consistent that way, though it would have been significantly more work and the sound quality would have suffered) that are really killer. There've been a bunch of songs lately that I keep thinking would be perfect to hear in the middle of a compilation, and when I got introduced to Amy Winehouse the other day, the mental percolating was tipped over the edge into necessary actuality.

There ended up being way too much for only one CD, so I've split it into two: The Ultimate Mix Tape and the still really really good, just not quite ultimate Penultimate Mix Tape. They're both stellar, and I can't stop listening to them. I tried to make the flow as natural and exciting as possible, and stick to my self-imposed rules that any song on a mix tape should make you think either:

a) Oh yeah, I love this song! And it's exactly what I'm in the mood to hear after that last one, or
b) What is this song? I love it! or
c) I love this artist, but I'm not too familiar with this song. Wow, it's really just as good as the ones I know better. Who knew?

Plus I got to have some fun setting up short themes or other tricky connections between consecutive tracks. I really wish I could just put the entire mixes on here for you to listen to, but they're 24 songs and over an hour each, so that's not gonna happen. However, since I'm convinced these really are the ultimate (and penultimate) mix tapes and therefore everyone should have a chance to hear them, I'll give you the track listings so you can make them yourself. Check it out:

The Penultimate Mix Tape

1. Anytime - My Morning Jacket
2. Come Into Force - Imitation Electric Piano
3. Out - Wire
4. I Can't Get Next To You - Al Green
5. Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken - Camera Obscura
6. Close to Me - The Cure
7. Kissing the Lipless - The Shins
8. Netsanet - Mulatu Astaque
9. Walk and Talk - The Velvet Underground (from the Peel Slowly and See box set)
10. Stop Breathin' - Pavement
11. Not a Friend - Sebadoh
12. I Can't Make Up My Mind - The Zombies
13. Pigeon Quest - City Field (local band; this one might be kind of hard to track down)
14. 52 Girls - The B52's
15. Me & Mr. Jones - Amy Winehouse
16. Swisha - Ratatat
17. See No Evil - Television
18. A Lazy Farmer Boy - Buster Carter & Preston Young (from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music box set)
19. Place To Be - Nick Drake
20. Tougher Than Tough - Derrick Morgan
21. Gotta Get the First Plane Home - The Kinks
22. Secret Agent Man - Devo
23. Chain Saw - The Ramones
24. Goin' On - The Flaming Lips

Next post: The Ultimate Mix Tape!

- Andrew