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My dear friend Tariq asked me to make him a mix of what I tend to lovingly call “sad bastard music,” and receiving the last of my thousands of CDs shipped up from my childhood home re-exposed me to several albums of that very sort of music, that I’d loved when I was 19 but hadn’t managed to digitize in the intervening years and had forgotten. Their emotional opennes spoke to me, in a way I wouldn’t have allowed them to in my 20s or 30s. As with the cousin mix to ‘The Beauty of Water‘ ‘A Boy & His Pet Heart,’ I was inspired to revisit music of my late teens, a period I’ve long treated as my musical “prehistory,” from right before my paths of sonic exploration multiplied exponentially, and which like the prehistoric became mostly buried over the years. And so, here is a mix more or less exactly as I would’ve 23 years ago, using songs I’m fairly sure I put on mixtapes and mix-CDs back then and shoved into the stereos of my friends.
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Goodness, what this music did to me at 19, a raw bundle of nerves and dreams; it struck me right to the core, felt to me like music I’d made myself (and sometimes tried to). It wasn’t so very far from the Joni and the Joan and the Simon & Garfunkel that shaped my youngest years, through my mom–mostly it was sweet, pretty, intelligent but not urbane, and emotionally exposed. And yet I could claim it as my own–made “now” (then), which can feel so important in youth. Along with emo and generalized “indie,” I soon (literally and figuratively) boxed most of it away, supplanted by funk and jazz and Krautrock and hip-hop and post-punk and sound library and all the stuff that eventually became the bulk of Musicophilia. But by ones early 40s, the potential for “embarrassment” has atrophied to near nil, particularly over matters of taste. Musicophilia has always been eclectic, and surely there’s room for these sounds, too. There will always be a place for a little sweet sadness, for some unabashedly open-hearted music.
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As evidenced by the solitary Musicophilia mix in 2022, recent months have been another phase in the near 15-year history of this blog when life has made mix-making infeasible. (The one bright light in a somewhat dark time is that I started making music of my own again for the first time in 20 years, improvised instrumental “sad bastard” music I’m forced to admit I somewhat like.) To anyone still listening, I thank you. As always, it means a lot for anyone to entrust me with their ears and their time. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to do more, and I hope the day will come when I can again. Thank you, also, for your patience and understanding, and I hope you’re finding plentiful paths to music you love and artists you can support.
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Download/stream the mix below the tracklist. Please, please, buy music (don’t just Spotify) at local shops, independent online sellers, Bandcamp et al. You have to stream thousands of times to make artists even pennies–buying music puts much-needed money into artists’ and labels hands immediately. Many of these albums are in print, or are at least available digitally. Thank you for listening, and please pass it on.
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Various – ‘The Beauty of Water’
1996-2000
01 [00:00] Ida – “Drunk Aviator” (‘Ten Small Paces’ 1997)
02 [02:05] Songs: Ohia – “Lighting Risked It All” (‘Ghost Tropic’ 2000)
03 [07:40] Gillian Welch – “Whiskey Girl” (‘Hell Among the Yearlings’ 1998)
04 [11:35] Geoff Farina – “Car” (‘Usonian Dream Sequence’ 1998)
05 [15:20] Archer Prewitt – “Another Peace of Mind” (‘Gerroa Songs’ 2000)
06 [20:30] Julie Doiron – “Will You Still Love Me In December?” (‘Will You Still Love Me?’ EP 1999)
07 [23:15] Yo La Tengo – “Last Days of Disco” (‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out’ 2000)
08 [29:35] Low – “Soon” (‘Secret Name’ 1999)
09 [34:50] Damien Jurado – “Tonight I Will Retire” (‘Ghost of David’ 2000)
10 [39:50] Cat Power – “I Found a Reason” (‘The Covers Record’ 2000)
11 [41:50] Mazzy Star – “All Your Sisters” (‘Among My Swan’ 1996)
12 [47:00] Neil Young – “Theme From ‘Dead Man'” (‘Dead Man OST’ 1996)
13 [51:55] Jeremy Enigk – “Lewis Hollow” (‘Return of the Frog Queen’ 1996)
14 [53:50] Karla Schickele – “Be Careful” (‘The Ida Retsin Family Volume One’ 1998)
15 [57:30] Will Oldham – “I See A Darkness” (‘I See A Darkness’ 1998)
16 [62:10] Dirty Three – “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” (‘Whatever You Love, You Are’ 2000)
17 [68:30] The Mountain Goats – “There Will Be No Divorce” (‘The Coroner’s Gambit’ 2000)
18 [71:20] Rachel’s – “Wally, Egon & Models” (‘Music for Egon Schiele’ 1996)
19 [76:00] Thom Yorke – “How I Made My Millions” (“No Surprises” single 1997)
[Total Time: 79:10]
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Download ‘The Beauty of Water’ As A Mixed File Here (178 MB)
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