Monthly Mixtape

June: Music Loves You Back

I'll be sharing music with my audience (ha-ha, I know, what audience?) in the form of a monthly playlist (like the itunes celebrity playlists just without the celebrity) . I'll write a little blurb about each pick to stretch my writing muscles and stimulate brain function.

1. Subterranean Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan
I picked this song because Haddie's name came about due in part to the movie "I'm Not There" a sort of arty biopic about Bob Dylan. This song plays on the dvd menu and is one of my favorite Dylan tunes.

2. Angel In The Snow - Elliott Smith
This is off of New Moon, a posthumous compilation album released last year. This song quickly became one of my favorites by this tortured sing-songwriter, probably because it's one of the few that doesn't make me want to slit my wrists.

3. An Owl With Knees - The Books
This indie duo mostly records acoustic songs mixed with sound clips from old non-musical recordings and movies. The two rarely actually sing, but when they do, you get great songs like this.

4. Making Time - Creation
Rushmore is one of the few movies I would want with me on a desert island. This song is from one of my favorite segments of the movie by a not-so-great band from the same era as The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and The Who. Maybe if they had put "The" in front of their name they would have had more success.

5. Wait - The Kills
Another soundtrack pick, this one is from Children of Men an apocalyptic movie where women lose the ability to bear children. Since the birth of Haddie, I've been listening to this song a lot.

6. Hospital Beds - Cold War Kids
My favorite discovery of 2007, this California band mixes easy-going production values with some great musicianship and songwriting. The only turn off may be the singers high-pitched vocals, but I love it, so you should too. Editors Note: Kids, prepositions are words you shouldn't end sentences with.

7. Teenage Kicks - Nouvelle Vague
Two brilliant French producers came up with the novel idea of having their native pop divas perform breezy acoustic versions of classic 80's tunes. This one may be my favorite, though their covers of Joy Division, The Cure, and Bauhaus are a lot of fun too.

8. Keep The Car Running - The Arcade Fire
The Arcade Fire followed up their debut last year with an album that left a lot people asking "How great are these guys?" Now maybe I'm the only person who asked that question, but if this song doesn't answer it, I don't know what will.

9. Cath... - Death Cab for Cutie
Let me take a moment to say that these guys should change their name to Death Cab, nobody calls them by their full name anymore. Anyway, this song is from their new album Narrow Stairs and is probably the only song that stands up to the greatness of Transatlantacism, their breakthrough album from 2003.

10. Oh Mandy - The Spinto Band
I was introduced to this song when I had a brief moment of online fame. A song I recorded was used in the trailer for the very-indie movie Four-Eyed Monsters, this is a better song from a different trailer.

11. Hold Tight - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch
Last soundtrack pick, this is from Quentin Tarantino's movie Deathproof. Tarantino does two things well, and they're actually the same thing. He takes a bad genre and extracts everything that's good from it and puts it onscreen. He does the same thing with music. This song is the only worthwhile recording from another forgotten sixties band with a name so incomprehensible it's even mispronounced in the movie.

That wraps up this months music update, I'll be back with more tunes in July.