Plus Ultra (March, 2009)
And here we are at the final (for now) entry. It’s been twenty-five years since the beginning of this story. I started out at age 17, in high school, living in the suburbs of New Orleans, barely having started dating. I’m now 41, gainfully employed in the same job for the past nine years, living in Massachusetts, happily married for 16 years. It’s been a long trip, though not a particularly strange one. The music I grew up with is now considered to be “oldies”, if it’s considered at all. I’ve watched bands I once adored fizzle into irrelevance.
I haven’t changed as much as the world around me has. Having become an adult during the rise of the Internet is something incredible. Though I am in actual contact with few to none of the people who were so close to me when I was young, things like Facebook and blogs and such have allowed me to remain tangential to them.
As I’ve grown older music has played less of a role in my life. I buy very few albums these days, content with hearing just a song or two from them. There are almost no bands I’d be willing to pay to see live these days. I don’t form the same kinds of attachments to music anymore. It happens.
I still have a TON of CDs from my heyday, though I’d happily get rid of most of them (I have them all backed up on hard drives.) Since I work from home, I’m by my computer most of the time and have all my music there, though admittedly, I seldom turn it on. When I’m in the car I more often listen to nothing than the radio or CDs. Even KEXP doesn’t get much listening from me these days. I keep a toe in the pool, but not much more than that. Quite honestly, I kind of got overwhelmed with choice not long ago and never fully recovered.
As is evidenced by the last few chapters, my life has settled down, and I am happy and comfortable with it. My job is such that I am done at 5:00 p.m. and don’t think about it until 8:30 the next morning, allowing me plenty of the most precious commodity on Earth, time, that I am free to spend with my wife, my friends, and my self.
I was hung up on my past for a long time — too long. The years I spent after college trying to figure out what I was supposed to do made me long for the days when I didn’t have to figure that out; things just happened to me. These days I look back on my youth with just a little bit of eye-rolling. I don’t cherish it uncritically, nor do I view it with disdain. It happened, it is who I was and what I did, and ultimately it all worked out. I wouldn’t go back to it for any price, not because it was any particular misery for me, but just because I’m not sure I’d want to be as clueless as I was again.
Thanks for joining me on this journey. It’s quite possible that I’ll be making more mixes in the future (perhaps one even fairly soon) and if I do I’ll be sure to update here.
You can always find me at my regular blog. Speaking of which, here’s the post where I started thinking about this mix:
and here is the post announcing it:
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Two years have passed since the previous mix, and once again the passage of time makes for better choices than if I had just banged another one out right away. Even the returning bands are mostly from new albums.
- Freezepop – Less Talk More Rokk
Here’s a new avenue for me to hear new-ish music. We started playing the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games which, in addition to having a lot of our old favorite songs on them, turned us on to new stuff. I had heard Freezepop before, but fell in love with this track.
- Alphabeat – Fantastic 6
No clue where I heard these folks.
- The Octopus Project – Truck
- Home Blitz – Hey!
- Great Lake Swimmers – Put There by the Land
I believe I first heard these bands on mp3 blogs. I bought the Octopus Project’s CD, which I like a lot, and I’d like to hear more of Home Blitz. I utterly love the “gum interlude” in this one.
- Be Your Own Pet – Becky
- Art Brut – Emily Kane
- Kaiser Chiefs – You Can Have it All
- Fujiya & Miyagi – Ankle Injuries
- Peter, Bjorn and John – Young Folks (featuring Victoria Bergsman)
- Camera Obscura – I Don’t Do Crowds
Much fewer KEXP tunes on this one, as I wasn’t listening to it as much. I’m not sure why that is.
- The Magic Numbers – Love Me Like You
This is kind of a goofy song, but I kinda dig it.
- The Arcade Fire – Keep The Car Running
- John Vanderslice – Time to Go
- Liars – Freak Out
- The Minders – 357
- They Might Be Giants – Seven Days Of The Week (I Never Go To Work)
- The Go! Team – The Wrath Of Marcie
- Fountains Of Wayne – Yolanda Hayes
- Cake – War Pigs
- Suzanne Vega – New York Is A Woman
- Beck – Think I’m In Love
- The Mountain Goats – Sax Rohmer #1
- Yo La Tengo – Beanbag Chair
- Shriekback – God’s Gardenias
- The Decemberists – Sons And Daughters
Quite a lot of returning bands here. Shriekback actually had another album out during this time, but it…oh, it’s not good. That’s new Mountain Goats, Liars, John Vanderslice and more. The Cake cover is okay, but I really could go for some new music from them.
- The Black Angels – Doves
A band James turned me on to.
- The Magnetic Fields – California Girls
I liked previous stuff from the Magnetic Fields, but it never made it onto a mix before. This sounds a lot like the Jesus and Mary Chain, as does the Liars tune. The funny thing is, the JAMC did have a new song out that was considered for this mix, but I didn’t like it as much as either of these.
- Gang Of Four – What We All Want
I don’t know how I never got into Gang of Four before, especially with Shriekback’s Dave Allen on bass. This song is great, and puts to shame all the bands who were trying to ape this sound at this time.
- Social X-Ray – Earthshake
- Triggers – Change It Up
Social X-Ray is my friend Dan’s band, which was playing live gigs at this time that we were going and seeing. At one of those shows there was also this band Triggers. I liked their sound a lot and bought the CD from them.
- Helms – Satin Rules
Heard these guys on an mp3 blog and fell for them hard, buying the album right away. It’s a great moody listen.
- Flobots – Handlebars
One of the rare times I was listening to the radio this song came on. It reminded me a lot of Cake, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t them — more like Cake, Jr. I love the buildup in it and the boasts (“Me and my friends saw a platypus!”)
- Panda Bear – Bros (edit)
Person Pitch is difficult to describe. It’s a breathtaking album from start to finish.
- The Ting Tings – That’s Not my Name
Goddamn I love this song.
- The Airborne Toxic Event – Does This Mean You’re Moving On
Becky heard these guys somewhere — KEXP? — and bought the CD. This song is exactly the kind of jaunty thing I go for.
- Baltic Fleet – Black Lounge
Another band that Andrew introduced me to.
- The Fiery Furnaces – The Old Hag Is Sleeping
I heard about this album on NPR. The whole thing is…well, it’s pretty intense, as you can imagine from this tune.
In 2008, to celebrate our 15th anniversary, Becky and I took a trip to Spain. “Plus Ultra” (“Further beyond”) was everywhere, and it stuck with us. It was especially apropos after nearly two years had passed since the previous mix.
Click on the player below to listen to this mix!
(xspf player courtesy Lacy Morrow and Fabricio Zuardi.)
U R NOT MY APPLE CAKE (July, 2004)
This mix came only a few months after the previous one, so not a lot had changed since then. I had now met Mike, who I was playing boardgames with, and had moved away from RPGs to boardgames regularly. I had found a good comics store, one that actually paid attention to books that didn’t feature people in capes, so I was enjoying comics again. Other than those things, everything else was the same.
In fact, although there are a few more mixes to go, the story is essentially over at this part — or, at least, we’ve caught up to just about the present. I’m all grows up, I’m married, live in a house, have a pretty steady job, good friends, interesting hobbies, in good health. I’m pretty much where I wanted to be back when this whole mess started in 1985, though it took the usual twists and turns to get there.
From here out there really isn’t much to say, story-wise. I may make a few comments here and there, but it’s mostly about the music.
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There are two major developments here. The first is, notice how many songs are on each side. Since Crusade and Jihad I had been making these mixes on CDs, not tapes. CDs caused a problem because, at about 75 minutes, they’re much longer than a tape side but much shorter than two tape sides (remember, I had been using 100-minute tapes.) So do I continue to make each “side” 50 minutes, or do I take advantage of the extra legroom? I had started doing the former, but here I switched to the latter.
The effect is, in retrospect, a case of diminishing returns. Having so many songs on a “side” pretty much diluted the effect of any individual song. Whereas before if a side had only four or five really standout tracks, that was fine, here, they just get swallowed up among the others. (It also didn’t help that increasing the number of songs meant not having to have as high standards, though I’ll admit that some previous tapes bring doubt to the idea that there were standards anyway.) For future mixes, I may go back to a more reasonable amount.
The second major development is KEXP, a Seattle radio station that streams online. I started listening to it on my computer and immediately found about a dozen songs I liked.
- Snow Patrol – How To Be Dead
This was a KEXP song that I absolutely fell in love with and listened to over and over. Probably the first album I bought strictly due to KEXP.
- Piebald – Karate Chops for Everyone But Me
- Weezer – Knock-down Drag-out
- The Benjamins – Wonderful
These songs came from Dan, who had a much more solid grasp on what was going on in music than I did. He was also a huge Weezer fan at the time, so I was hearing a lot more of them than I might have been otherwise.
- Guster – Amsterdam
I don’t think I heard these guys on KEXP first, but it seemed like they were filling the top40-friendly jangle band niche vacated by the Gin Blossoms.
- Elf Power – Embrace the Crimson Tide
- The Apples in Stereo – Please
- The Minders – Tearaway
Elf Power was another Elephant 6 band, and since I liked other bands in the group, such as The Minders and The Apples in Stereo (and Dressy Bessy, taking a break here, I guess) I checked them out. For some reason they didn’t really grab me as much as the others, but I liked this tune.
- Owsley – Coming Up Roses
I had read about Owsley somewhere and the absolutely perfect pop music he was making. I like this song a lot, but none of the others I heard made much of an impression on me.
- Foo Fighters – Generator
At this point, this may be the band on this mix that’s been included the longest, but I’m pretty sure it’s the end of the road for them.
- Maroon 5 – Harder to Breathe
I haven’t the slightest clue where I heard these guys or why I included this. I mean, I don’t dislike it, but I don’t have the foggiest notion where it came from.
- Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – Love Burns
- Hooverphonic – 2Wicky
- Jimmy Eat World – If You Don’t Don’t
- The New Pornographers – The Electric Version
- Grandaddy – The Group Who Couldn’t Say
- Phantom Planet – California
- They Might Be Giants – Damm Good Times
- The Polyphonic Spree – Section 12 (Hold Me Now)
Return performers from previous mixes.
- Delerium – Euphoria (Firefly)
I had had this song as an mp3 for ages and have no idea where I had originally heard it, or why it suddenly shows up here.
- Pendulum – Broadcast
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps
- Air – Playground Love
- Modest Mouse – Float On
- The Vines – Ride
- Hot Hot Heat – Oh, Goddamnit
- Robyn Hitchcock – Viva! Sea-Tac
- Camera Obscura – Teenager
- Caesar’s Palace – Jerk It Out
- Mirah – Cold Cold Water
- Mellowdrone – Fashionably Uninvited
- South – Loosen Your Hold
- The Postal Service – Brand New Colony
- Puracane – Big Day
All of these came from KEXP. For many of them I can’t tell you anything about the band or anything else they’ve done; I just heard the songs on KEXP and liked them. In fact, only one of these resulted in an album purchase (The Postal Service), though I’ve been meaning to get a few of the others. Obviously a couple of them (“Maps”, “Float On”) were much more well-known than the others, but for me they all came from the same place and had the same weight.
I mentioned last time my confusion about “Surfing on a Rocket” by Air being on that mix. The album that’s from, Talkie Walkie was THE talk of KEXP when I first started listening, and that’s where I first heard them, yet none of the other KEXP songs were on that mix. A MYSTERY INDEED.
- Cake – Ruby Sees All
While waiting for a new Cake album I decided to go back to their first one, since I had jumped on the Cake album after that.
- Fountains Of Wayne – Stacy’s Mom
The song that would make — and, it looks like, break — Fountains of Wayne. “Stacy’s Mom” got tons of airplay, and had a well-known video, but didn’t really rise above the ranks of “summer novelty hit”. I can’t even argue that it’s nothing like their other songs — it’s not that different from a lot of them — but it clearly didn’t have anything that made anyone want to look further into this incredibly talented band, which is a damn shame. If that isn’t bad enough, I forgot this song on the CD cover I made.
- Thee Spivies – Holly
I’ve known a lot of fellows named Chris in my life, and this song came from Chris G.
- Jem – Just A Ride
Pretty sure she got a fair amount of airplay, and I think Becky got the CD.
- The Shins – New Slang
Though The Shins were also loved by KEXP, I first heard them on the Garden State soundtrack. I heard other bits of this album and Chutes Too Narrow and wasn’t much taken by anything else, even though it seemed they were wowing everyone else.
The title comes from a post on IMDB that was picked up by the humor site Something Awful. Dan and I saw it and LAUGHED AND LAUGHED.
Your next question is: Why is the cover so crappy? It’s a good question. The answer is because it was the first cover I made. In fact, it was supposed to just be temporary. It wasn’t until afterwards that I went back and made the other covers, and I improved my Paint Shop Pro technique as I went along. I really should make a better one for this mix, especially since I omitted a song on the back.
Click on the player below to listen to this mix!
(xspf player courtesy Lacy Morrow and Fabricio Zuardi.)
