Thursday playlist: So grateful I can feel at all — Mix ’07

Cat’s in the Basket 2

In keeping with the trend of recent Thursday playlists from Bryan and Rachel, I’ve assembled my year-end mix for your delectation and/or derision. With one or two technical exceptions, all these are songs from 2007.

Download the mix here and now. [Downloading closed.] I feel a little squeamish about filesharing, so I’m going to remove the link (and this mention of offering it as a download) in a week.*

So Grateful I Can Feel at All
1. Stay Bright – Linda Thompson
2. Everybody’s Down – No Age
3. No Dreams – Oakley Hall
4. Pink Light – Laura Veirs
5. Outside of This Car, the End of the World! – Le Loup
6. Winter Windows – Sea Wolf
7. Tell Me How – Sara Lov
8. Thousands Are Sailing to Amerikay – Tim O’Brien
9. My Twin – Eleni Mandell
10. Tennessee Porch Swing – Sir Richard Bishop
11. The Signifying Wolf – Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Dawn McCarthy
12. First Fantasy – Citay
13. Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car – Iron & Wine
14. Farewell My Friends – Cath & Phil Tyler
15. Bless These Blues – PG Six
16. School Song Misfortune – Múm
17. The Times They Are A Changin’ – The Del McCoury Band
18. El Dorado – Michael Hurley
19. Happy Days Are Here Again – Danielson

I like to make year-end mixes based on how songs fit together (and title them with one of my favorite lyrics from one of the songs). Sometimes some of my favorite artists and songs from a year don’t make the cut, simply because they don’t sound right in a mix. Conversely, some things not necessarily among my favorites (but still damn fine songs) will make the mix because they fit perfectly in a particular spot.

Liner notes for the music nerds among us follow.

1. This tune is slightly miscredited, because while it appears on Linda Thompson’s Versatile Heart, she neither wrote nor played on the track, which was composed by her son Teddy and arranged by Robert Kirby. This is one of my favorite records of the year.

2. No Age’s Weirdo Rippers is probably my favorite record of the year. LA punk rock!

3. Oakley Hall are rockin’ and trippy, dude.

4. For a great show, go see Laura Veirs; Saltbreakers would make my year-end best records list.

5. You’ve heard about Le Loup from BW already, so there’s not much for me to say. This record is really, really good.

6. Sea Wolf are from LA; I like them, and they put on a good show.

7. Sara Lov sings in Devics and is also from LA. Plus I’ve met her, and she’s a very nice person, and also a really good singer and songwriter.

8. This song comes from a compilation released in 2007 called Song of America; Janet Reno executive produced and did the liner notes. Seriously. Tim O’Brien is a roots and bluegrass musician from Nashville; fiddle, mandolin, guitar, he plays it all.

9. Eleni Mandell is one of my favorite LA singers; all her records are really good.

10. Sir Richard Bishop used to be in Sun City Girls; now he plays solo guitar pieces that are mind-bendingly intricate. This is the shortest track from his latest record, Polytheistic Fragments, and therefore the only one appropriate for a mix.

11. Okay, so here’s one possible exception to the ’07 rubric of this mix. This track was released in the year 2007 on Wai Notes, the demos for Bonnie Billy’s The Letting Go, released the year before. This is the only song on the demos that didn’t make the final record, but it does appear in different form on the “Cursed Sleep” ep from 2006. So sue me.

12. Citay are from San Francisco; they too are rockin’ and trippy, dude.

13. Ladies and gentlemen, Sam Beam and his amazing beard.

14. This is the other slight cheat. This song appeared on a compilation that came with an issue of The Wire in 2007. The official release, however, won’t be until sometime in 2008. Cath is in a great band called Cordelia’s Dad, which seems to be more or less on hiatus now.

15. PG Six‘s Slightly Sorry is one of the best-titled and best records of the year. He does a killer version of “The Lily of the West,” a traditional song I just adore.

16. Múm made a video that everyone seems to like. I like it too, plus their 2007 record, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy.

17. A Bob Dylan cover from 2007 that wasn’t on the soundtrack to I’m Not There? Strange but true. This also comes from Song of America; Del McCoury is a living legend.

18. Michael Hurley is one of my all-time favorite artists. Lyrics to this one are from a poem by Mr. E.A. Poe, who Hurley claims came to him in a dream and asked to have it set to music. Angelenos, take note: Hurley plays McCabe’s in Santa Monica on February 10.

19. Sometimes I think Danielson is more a cult than a band. I like them okay, but I’m not a big fan on account of I’m afraid to drink anybody’s Kool-Aid. All the same, their cover of this Depression-era song (also from Janet Reno’s Song of America) seemed to me the perfect ending for a mix from the year when “subprime” was voted “Word of the Year” by the American Dialect Society. Irony? Oh, I think so.

*My not-completely-rhetorically-sound rationalization for sharing the files in the first place follows.

Yes, there’s no such thing as an action that is just a little bit illegal, but I also feel that there are gray areas when it comes to sharing music. Mixes are one of these gray areas. Yes, each song is copyrighted, but my creativity has gone into selecting and ordering the songs. I’m not offering an entire album from one artist. Moreover, I like to think that a mix I make serves as a kind of underground publicity for the artists. Perhaps someone who downloads this mix will go out and buy (whether by download or in physical form) music by some of these artists once they’ve heard them here. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool, and my selections serve as recommendations.

Also, I have burned and would burn copies of the mix for friends, so offering it as a limited-time download amounts for me to much the same thing. Burning a copy is technically illegal, of course, but is generally more acceptable for me because distribution is to a much smaller number of people (unless one of the recipients decides to upload the files and share them). Is there one among us who hasn’t, say, gone to Record Club and shared music that is then burned to a disc? Let him or her cast the first stone.

16 responses to “Thursday playlist: So grateful I can feel at all — Mix ’07”

  1. bryan says:

    great mix so far, tim. i’m really digging it. and you picked my second favorite — maybe my favorite, actually — song from the le loup.

    and laura viers! i wish i had liked that last album more.

    more comments to follow later in the day, once i’ve listened to this a few more times.

    for discussion’s sake — what do people think about tim’s squeamishness to post the mix or leave it posted for longer?

  2. Rachel says:

    The mix looks great, Tim. I look forward to listening to it tonight. (also–great kitty photo!)

    A lot of file sharing sites (such as Yousendit, which a lot of music bloggers use) only leave the files up for a week or for a maximum number of downloads, whichever comes first. Frankly, I was surprised to see that DivShare still has Bryan’s and my mixes available. I don’t really share Tim’s squeamishness, but I do know that I discover more music, buy more CDs, go to more shows as a result of my own forays into downloading, so it all comes out in the wash. I try to do right by the artists. Is that naive?

  3. Dave says:

    Burning a copy of a mix for a friend is perfectly legal, I believe. There’s also a lot of similarity between sharing a mix here and what a MP3 blogs do by offering a couple of songs from different artists — a practice that most artists seem to appreciate, even if the record companies don’t like it.

    I didn’t know Divshare left the files up indefinitely — maybe not a good thing.

  4. Jen says:

    Merle!

  5. Jen says:

    Artists will often pay to have their tracks included on compilations, believe it or not. Of course, these artists didn’t ask to have their songs on your compilation, but frankly, I’d be bowled over if anyone (artist, label, other) decided it was a worthwhile use of time to sue a blogger for posting what amounts to free PR.

  6. LP says:

    re: 3: According to our dear friend Andrea S, who worked for the DOJ on piracy issues (arrr!), it is illegal to copy and distribute music in any form, mix tapes / CD or otherwise. Even one song, even for just a week. They don’t see any gray areas. Of course, you’re not going to get indicted for a year-end mix tape (as well you shouldn’t). But just to clarify, it is technically illegal.

  7. LP says:

    Merle is in the basket!! Hurrah!

  8. Jeremy says:

    So, that means I can wait for my hard copy…? I loved the inclusions of Sara, Eleni, and Sea Wolf–but I’m biased (and totally pissed that you beat me to the punch, since those three are on my end-of-the-year mix, too, although not necessarily the same songs).

  9. Tim Wager says:

    If anyone would prefer a hard copy, just let me know, and I’ll break the law that way instead of this.

    I hope the rambling justification to share the files hasn’t stopped anyone from downloading the mix; mostly I was trying to figure it out for myself why I think this is okay (morally speaking, not legally), but that other forms of filesharing aren’t. (Also, a certain Whatsitter was all up in my grill about making the files available, and I wanted to let that person in on my reasoning.) Generally, to my mind it has something to do with the part vs. the whole. Uploading (or downloading) an entire album or movie or something is not okay for me. While these *are* whole songs, of course, they are part of a mix, and that puts them in a different moral category for me. Primarily, I hazard to guess that the artists would not be offended (or perhaps would even be flattered) by being included in such a mix, but that they *would* be offended if I offered up their entire albums.

    Happy listening, all the same! Let me know what you think.

    P.S. Jeremy, sorry to have nicked some of your artist selections. To make things worse, we got the Sara Lov CD from you!

  10. cynthia says:

    I want a hard a copy

  11. WilliamTheFireChief says:

    That’s what she said!

  12. Tim Wager says:

    Hi Cynthia,

    Email me your address (using my Greatwhatsit email on the “about” page) and I’ll mail you a copy.

  13. E. says:

    loved it tim, thanks!

  14. trixie says:

    hahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahaha
    that’s what she said, indeed.

  15. k says:

    T-Dub, I just DLed this, can’t wait to listen! Rob Sheffield was reading here last night and I was going to go interview him about donuts, but FORGOT. Am I a moron, or what?

  16. Tim says:

    Going once . . . going twice . . .

    I’ll remove the link to the mix at the end of the day, so get it while it’s available.