Category Archives: mixtapes

2024 Year in Review: April

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Looking back on my writing diary, it looks like I’d started the fourth and thankfully final version of my novel Theadia. For this go-round I chose to do what I’d done with A Division of Souls by pretty much starting from scratch again. A lot of the work stayed the same, but I was completely rewriting the first several chapters. Normally I’d just revise once I get to the Revision stage, but this one definitely needed a lot more work than just a dusting and cleaning. As it stands, I’m very close to the final chapters, so while it’s taken me a long time to work on this one, I’d like to think it was worth going at a slow pace to make all the improvements needed.

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Mixtape/Playlist, Theadia 4, created 1 April. The fourth (and possibly final) soundtrack mixtape for my current WIP novel and one of my favorites. The idea behind this series was for it to be a mix of moody and cinematic sounds (like the tracks from Eluvium, The Fauns and Big Wreck) as well as quirky alternative rock (such as Ducks Ltd, Middle Kids and Torres)…basically stuff that the two main characters would listen to while at work! I really like how this one came out.

Garbage, Bleed Like Me Deluxe Edition, released 5 April. I remember this one coming out way back in April of 2005, one of the first albums I’d bought after I’d moved down to New Jersey a month previous. It was seen as a sort of comeback album after 2001’s club-oriented Beautiful Garbage and a return to form similar to their guitar-heavy 1995 debut.

Jane Weaver, Love in Constant Spectacle, released 5 April. Weaver is a singer that crossed my path a few years ago via KEXP but rarely got much play, but this one stuck out for me. She’s very similar to St Vincent in sound, only more contemplative and less abrasive. This one got a lot of play during my writing sessions!

The Black Keys, Ohio Players, released 5 April. Despite their unfortunate tour debacle, this album was highly lauded by critics when it came out. While it sounds like they’re moving away from their noisy indie roots, they’ve returned to their love of blues and heavy rock. It’s definitely an off-kilter album but a very enjoyable one.

Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us, released 5 April. Speaking of off-kilter indie bands, they’ve pretty much decided to slide even further away from their light twee pop and towards more adventurous sounds. This is also a very strange but highly enjoyable album as well.

Bad Bad Hats, Bad Bad Hats, released 12 April. This one showed up on my radar via AllMusic of all places, getting a decent review. It only took the first track on the album (the above “My Heart Your Heart”, one of my favorite songs of the year) to make me fall in love with it! Pretty much in line with female-led bands like Wet Leg, they revel in their quirkiness by writing super catchy pop tunes that get stuck in your head.

Linkin Park, Papercuts, released 12 April. A sort-of greatest hits collection from this band that features several of their best songs as well as a new track (see above), an outtake from their last album with Chester Bennington, One More Light. A great place to start. And yes, this band will show up again on this series soon!

Nia Archives, Silence is Loud, released 12 April. Yet another KEXP find, she’s a singer that defies genre…you’re not sure if she’s r&b, electronic, alternative, or just a mangle of all three. Interestingly enough I sense a Wire vibe in her music, both experimentally and melodically.

English Teacher, This Could Be Texas, released 12 April. Another KEXP find — and they actually name-drop the station on this album! — their track “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” is both strange and catchy as hell, and well worth picking up. It’s a super fun record, and all the critics seem to love it.

The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Unwishing Well, released 12 April. Yet another album from my favorite super-local band (and not the only one this year!), this one feels lighter and brighter than some of his previous work. “Learning to Love a Band” got stuck in my head that spring!

Pearl Jam, Dark Matter, released 19 April. Proud to say I’ve been a fan since Ten and I haven’t given up on them yet! I love that their last couple of albums really bring them back to their classic hard riff/introspective lyric style. There’s a lot of tension in this one that works really well with my writing sessions!

Orcas, “Under the Milky Way” single, released 19 April. Don’t mind me, just fawning over a quite lovely cover of one of my all-time favorite songs. Their album which they’d drop a few months later is quite wonderful too!

Corridor, Mimi, released 26 April. Another album that popped up on my radar thanks to AllMusic. This is definitely a band I’d have heard on college radio and seen on 120 Minutes back in the late 80s with its post-punk style. “Jump Cut” is one of those songs that gets stuck in my head.

Pet Shop Boys, Nonetheless, released 26 April. A lot of critics and fans see this one as one of their best out of the latter half of their career, and I’m inclined to agree. They’ve chosen to veer away from the dancefloor on this one, and it’s an interesting choice as it reminds us that they wrote brilliant mid-tempo tunes and ballads as well. It’s wild to see that they’re still going strong after all these years, and still writing amazing music.

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More to come in May!

2024 Year in Review: January

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And so we approach the end of the year, and it’s time once again to take a look at some of my favorite albums and singles! As always, the playlist is all over the place: old favorites, new discoveries, dreamlike grooves and dense walls of sound. KEXP was once again the impetus for my finding and downloading a lot of these albums.

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SPRINTS, Letter to Self, released 5 January. “Up and Comer” got a lot of airplay on KEXP at the beginning of the year, enough that I just had to see what the rest of the album was about, and I was not let down. It’s post-punk in the classic sense, full of restrained twitchiness without going off the rails with messy abandon, which can sometimes be the downside to classic punk rock.

Nailah Hunter, Lovegaze, released 12 January. Hunter defies multiple genres in her music; it’s not quite indie rock, not quite new age, not quite David Lynch-style creepy jazz, but an otherworldly mix of it all. You’re never quite sure where the songs are going to go, yet they still transport you into an alternate reality of calm contemplation and unsettling displacement.

The Fauns, How Lost, released 19 January. This is one of the first albums of the year that struck a chord with me and stayed in my playlist throughout most of it. Partly due to the unexpected yet lovely cover of Freur’s synthpop classic “Doot Doot” but mostly because I’ve been leaning very heavily on the shoegaze these last couple of years. And yet they’re also steeped in that snythpop groove as well, a mix that works perfectly and lands right my wheelhouse. Album closer “Spacewreck” is one of those dreamy epic ballads that hits me right in the feels. This one got a lot of play while I worked on Theadia.

Sleater-Kinney, Little Rope, released 19 January. This band’s evolution has been a fascinating one, veering from riot-grrl punk to noise pop to jangle and swerving to moody contemplation. This record appealed to me because of its lighter touch yet still refusing to let up on the tension.

Green Day, Saviors, released 19 January. The sad thing about commercial alternative stations like Live 105 here in San Francisco is that they’ll premier the new song by this band, and yet a month later it’ll disappear only to have Dookie-era singles remaining on their playlist. And this is a local band!! While this may not have hit everyone’s buttons, it’s a good example of a band that refuses to go quietly and does so by remaining strong and doing what it does best.

The Umbrellas, Fairweather Friend, released 26 January. One of my favorite uber-local bands (they’re here in the Richmond District, as I recall), this jangle-pop quartet takes inspiration directly from classic indie bands like Beat Happening (complete with a lead singer with a deep and sonorous voice) and writes super fun and catchy tunes that are loved both by fans and critics alike.

Ty Segall, Three Bells, released 26 January. Segall has always been a bit of a weirdo (and a prolific one at that) with a sound that’s not quite Flaming Lips and not quite Pere Ubu yet somewhere in between. And yet he’s quite reserved and contemplative on this album, revealing yet another level of his style that you can’t ignore.

The Smile, Wall of Eyes, released 26 January. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood (and Tom Skinner) have been keeping busy with this side project of theirs, releasing not one but two full albums this past year. The unsettling “Bending Hectic” had been released as a teaser single at the end of 2023, and the ensuing album was just as strange and compelling.

TORRES, What an enormous room, released 26 January. She’s been around for over a decade now, but it’s only recently that I finally got into her music, first with 2021’s Thirstier (which got a lot of play on KEXP). This newest follow-up feels more cohesive and demanding than that previous album, especially with its hooky and in-your-face single “Collect”. This album also got quite a lot of play in Spare Oom during my writing sessions, and it’s one of my favorites of the year.

Mixtape/Playlist, Re:Defined 2401, created 30 January. I actually started making this one in the latter half of 2023 as a Walk in Silence mix, yet I couldn’t quite figure out why it wasn’t entirely gelling for me. After the new year I realized the issue was that I was constricting myself, trying to force a mix that wasn’t appealing. A few tracks got dropped, a handful thrown in, and a renaming made it work! I’d used the Re:Defined moniker in the early 00s as a way to give these mixes more breathing room with several kinds of styles and sounds. I’m glad I did, because these ended up getting a lot of play!

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Coming up: February tunage!

Coming up on year’s end…

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I never got around to creating an end of year mixtape for 2023 — or a best-of list, come to think of it — and to be honest, I had good reason for it. While it was a good year for the most part, there were other personal things going on that took precedence, and it just fell by the wayside. I just didn’t have the spoons for it. It is what it is, though. It’s not the end of the world.

Now that we’re a month and a half away from the end of 2024, I’m pretty sure I’ll have something to go in the last week of December. I caught up on mixtape-making this year by reviving the Re:Defined series that I’d created back in the early 00s for similar reasons: changes in music tastes, changes in personal life, changes in outlook.

And there’s definitely been a lot of good stuff out there this year. I don’t always get to listen to it as frequently as I’d like (and I’d like to change that habit in the new year), but on the other hand there were quite a few albums I’ve been returning to on a consistent basis. Songs that get stuck in my head for days at a time.

We’ll see where this all leads in the coming weeks!

New Mixtape: Songs from the Eden Cycle Vol 10

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Whew! Hard to believe I’ve hit ten volumes on this series! The first one was made waaay back in the summer of 1997 during the HMV Years when I first planned out The Phoenix Effect, with the next three following close behind later that year and the fourth (my favorite at the time) in the summer of 1998. Flash-forward twenty years and I start making them again in late 2018 when I was self-publishing the Bridgetown Trilogy. [There were a few related diversions in 2003-4 and 2015 during the writing/editing of it, though I consider them a separate series now.]

This one was started probably late 2023 as a way to revisit the Mendaihu Universe though that was soon put aside so I could prep Queen Ophelia’s War for release and finish off Theadia. Considering I’m almost done with the latter and once again returning to the MU, I felt it time to finish this one off and get it into my listening rotation.

I’m fascinated by how eclectic this one is. There’s a lot of shoegaze, sure, but we’ve also got some oddball electronics, a bit of jazz, a few tracks that I’m currently obsessing over (that GIFT album has become one of my favorites of the year) and more. Just like the previous mixes in this series, they’re supposed to evoke a bit of urban distraction in one way or another, whether it’s the feeling of displacement, the discomfort of a stressful situation, or the willingness of blissful disconnection.

Hope you enjoy!

SIDE ONE
1. Hooverphonic, “A Guiding Star at Night”
2. Phantogram, “It Wasn’t Meant to Be”
3. Jonathan Bree, “City Baby”
4. Kelly Lee Owens, “Love You Got”
5. Kamasi Washington, “Interstellar Peace (The Last Stance)”
6. Bodywash, “Perfect Blue”
7. Whitelands, “Cheer”
8. GIFT, “Later”
9. Corridor, “Jump Cut”
10. Iress, “Mercy”

SIDE TWO
1. Whitelands, “Born in Understanding”
2. Ride, “I Came to See the Wreck”
3. Coma, “Surrender”
4. M83, “Radar, Far, Gone”
5. GIFT, “Milestones”
6. The Chemical Brothers, “Feels Like I Am Dreaming”
7. Jenny O, “Pleasure in Function”
8. Jonathan Bree, “Steel and Glass”
9. Coldplay, “One World”

New Mixtape — Re:Defined 2404

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Making the new Re:Defined mixtapes have definitely been an interesting experience, as I’ve given myself a reason to work not just with tracks that are getting a decent amount of play on KEXP but deep cuts that catch my attention when I’m listening to the albums at other times. I think I’ve finally hit a groove with this mix, as there’s a certain vibe that I hadn’t reached in quite some time. Have fun and give it a listen!

Track listing:

SIDE ONE
1. Hinds, “Boom Boom Back” (feat. Beck)
2. Mavis Staples, “Worthy”
3. Orcas, “Under the Milky Way” (a lovely cover!)
4. Cassandra Jenkins, “Delphinium Blue”
5. Liam Gallagher & John Squire, “Just Another Rainbow”
6. DAIISTAR, “Tracemaker”
7. The Softies, “23rd Birthday”
8. Jane Weaver, “Love in Constant Spectacle”
9. GIFT, “Going in Circles”
10. Bastille, “Emily & Her Penthouse in the Sky”
11. Ride, “I Came to See the Wreck”

SIDE TWO
1. Orville Peck & Beck, “Death Valley High”
2. deary, “Selene”
3. BADBADNOTGOOD, “Last Laugh”
4. GIFT, “Later”
5. Quivers, “Apparition”
6. Yannis & the Yaw with Tony Allen, “Rain Can’t Reach Us”
7. Wand, “Mistletoe”
8. Glass Animals, “Wonderful Nothing”
9. The Softies, “I Said What I Said”
10. beabadoobee, “Take a Bite”
11. Iress, “Mercy”

Two new mixtapes!

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Unlike last year, where I was just too preoccupied with Real Life and other things and hadn’t allowed myself to really get to know the new music I was acquiring, I’m making a concerted effort to pay attention to what’s coming out these days, and I’m quite happy to say that I’m finding a lot of really good stuff out there!

These two mixtapes were basically holdovers from late 2023 where I’d started a list of songs but hadn’t gotten around to completing it and arranging the tracklist flow. I’m quite happy with how they came out, however, and I hope you enjoy them as well!

From the Open Skies: In My Blue World 2, created 14 January 2024. No, I have not written the sequel to In My Blue World just yet! I only have a very rough two-page outline of an idea, but I think it’s worth working on as a future project later on in the year! All I’ll say that it involves our heroes facing off a new foe with a much stronger and creepier ability to siphon magic for their own nefarious uses! And what better way to prep for a future novel project than creating a mixtape soundtrack for it? [Note: for those of you playing along, the title here is borrowed from another ELO song, heh.]

Walk in Silence XXVIII, created 30 January 2024. First of all, I can’t believe I’m already up to twenty-eight volumes of this series!! (Then again, I’ve been making them since 1988, so…) This, Listen in Silence and Untitled have pretty much become my own NOW That’s What I Call… compilations that just won’t quit. This one came out surprisingly well and I’m finding myself returning to it more and more.

The Boston Years Continued: Slacker Central, Part XXX

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The summer movie season begins at the Somerville Sony Theatre, which means a constantly packed building, which means a mountain of dropped popcorn and forgotten drink cups to clean up quickly after each show. [Hint: Use an electric leaf blower at the back row and it all tumbles down to the front, making it quicker and easier to sweep and toss.] It also means me staying after shift several nights a week to watch all the exciting new films dropping, sometimes multiple viewings. Because why the hell not? D was back home and I had nothing better to do.

I did a lot of walking that summer as well. There were a few evenings where I’d missed the last Orange Line T into town and would have to walk back to Allston. That was intriguing in itself, because I’d never been a long distance walker before, and my apartment was about three miles away. I did it, though, and multiple times.

But what I did most that time was start the Great Transcription Project. I’ve mentioned this many times before, and this was where it all began for me as a writer using a PC. I’d always written longhand in the past, and having uninterrupted use of one for an entire summer was an enticement I could not pass up. But where to start…? I decided that perhaps I should start from the beginning? Or a beginning, at any rate. I’d transcribed my poems and lyrics a few years earlier on typewriter, but this was where I went one further and started transcribing my juvenilia: the Infamous War Novel, Belief in Fate, the several abandoned ideas, and what the hell, a cleaner version of the poems again! I had a ton of time when I wasn’t at work, so I got some 3″ floppies from my sister and set about working. [And yes, even then I had a PC distraction: I taught myself how to properly play solitaire, and played several hands before, during and after writing sessions.]

I also played around with Bridgetown a bit more. Even though True Faith took place in a different city named NewCanta (which is mentioned in passing several times in the Bridgetown Trilogy), I knew I wanted to return to this other city as well. Whether it would be in this novel or elsewhere was unknown at this point. One summer afternoon I expanded on a map of the city I’d drawn back in the Shoebox for Vigil, and I’d often refer to that one while writing outtakes and ideas.

Mixtape, Untitled VI, created June 1995. This by far is one of my favorite mixtapes I’d made during the Boston Years, and it got a hell of a lot of play on my Walkman. It’s mostly a mix of recent songs in my collection and stuff taped off the radio, and all of them songs I knew would fit perfectly on a summer mix. I also love the fact that each side ends with bizarre short songs. [When I first got a CDW drive for my own PC during the Belfry years, this was the first mix I remade onto CD, adding several extra tracks from the same era.]

U2, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” single, released 5 June 1995. I remember hearing this for the first time on WBCN, as the band was close friends with the DJ Carter Alan who’d championed them way back in the early 80s, and had given him the track as a world premiere. It’s a fascinating and wild track that contains the noisy style of Achtung Baby but with a more experimental sound, something they’d expand on a short while later on their Passengers side project.

Soundtrack, Batman Forever, released 6 June 1995. The U2 song was of course from this soundtrack…which also contained what would become Seal’s biggest ever hit, “Kiss from a Rose”. I have to admit this was my favorite of the 90s Batman movies because it chose not to take itself seriously at all, yet avoids the corniness of the 60s show. I must have seen this movie at least four or five times that summer.

Catherine Wheel, Happy Days, released 6 June 1995. This band’s third album may not have hit the heights that Ferment and Chrome did with their classic singles, but it’s mostly because they’d moved away from the trippy dreampop of those albums and focused more on harder alt-rock. The single “Waydown” is wild and weird, but it’s the lovely “Judy Staring at the Sun” which features Tanya Donelly that got them major radio play.

Soul Asylum, Let Your Dim Light Shine, released 6 June 1995. While not as popular as Grave Dancers Union from a few years previous, this did contain the single “Misery” which got quite a lot of play that summer. This was a band that was heading the same direction as Goo Goo Dolls, becoming less punk and more AOR.

Jennifer Trynin, Cockamamie, released 13 June 1995. A local guitarist and a burgeoning desktop publisher, she had a minor hit with the quirky and fun “Better Than Nothing” on WFNX and WBCN. She had a very short but interesting solo career but has popped up over the years as a session musician. Well worth checking out.

Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill, released 13 June 1995. I remember hearing “You Oughta Know” on WFNX while taking the T home one afternoon and thinking damn, this is the kind of pissed off attitude that’s missing in alternative rock these days. [I mean, it was there, it was just that it had become solely owned by the alt-metal bands starting to come out.] I signed onto this one pretty quickly and constantly listened to this album that summer.

Jill Sobule, Jill Sobule, released 13 June 1995. I was already familiar with her music by this time, having seen her opening up for Joe Jackson back in 1991 for her Things Here Are Different album, but this was the breakthrough she had with the classic and funny “I Kissed a Girl”.

Bjork, Post, released 13 June 1995. I was a bit late in buying this one, getting it from Columbia House a few months later, but I loved it once I had it. It’s probably my favorite of her solo records, not quite as quirky as Debut and not as weird as her later work. “Hyperballad” has also become my favorite of her songs.

The Verve, A Northern Soul, released 20 June 1995. A few years before their ubiquitous single “Bittersweet Symphony”, this was a minor hit on alternative radio, showcasing their more swirly Stones-y Britpop sound. “This Is Music” got a bit of play here and there at the time.

Ben Lee, Grandpaw Would, released 22 June 1995. So how do you react to a sixteen year old who writes damn catchy indie pop…for a solo career after breaking up his previous band? Aside from oh god I’m old, I mean, heh. “Pop Queen” got a bit of minor play.

The Chemical Brothers, Exit Planet Dust, released 26 June 1995. This duo’s first album was so groundbreaking it blew away so many other electronic bands at the time. It’s a perfect blend of blissed-out rave, creative sampling, and surprisingly catchy melodies. Like Fatboy Slim soon after, this was a band made for the dance floor that also work just fine coming out of your speakers at home. Highly recommended.

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Next up: A strict deadline, just to see if I can do it. [Spoilers: I do! With time to spare!]

The Boston Years Continued: Slacker Central, Part XVI

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Tt just so happened that the day after I’d unceremoniously quit the Longwood Coop, I’d decided to drown my sorrows and frustrations by taking the Green Line T for a ride out to Riverside Station and back, just to get my mind off things. And of course, my mom happened to call the store for some now-forgotten reason, so as was normal in my youth, my parents found out about my misadventures before I could even get myself home!

Thankfully I wasn’t unemployed for too long. Boston being what it was at the time, I could find a job somewhere if I didn’t mind doing retail, or something completely not in my expected career path. As a GenXer in the 90s, you took what you could get, whatever it might be. Better to be paid than miserable, yeah? So thus starts my next job at Brigham’s Ice Cream on Cambridge Street, just up the road from the Charles Street T stop on the Red Line. An easy walkable commute, and the not exactly allowable ability to ‘forage’ so I wasn’t always broke and hungry.

On the writing end of things, I found myself finally pushing forward with the Two Thousand project, my attempt at the Gen-X-ennui-avec-excellent-soundtrack story. Hell, I was even writing more poetry again! Just fragments at the time, but the point of that exercise was to write something, just to get myself going again. More importantly I was also playing around with a few more ideas regarding the Nocturne idea, having recently rented Gall Force 2: Destruction, the second in the series. There was something about this series that resonated with me: the idea of resurrection, reincarnation, and the creation of life starting elsewhere sounded like a really fascinating idea to me.

It was also around this time that I started looking into new age spirituality. Not entirely to an obsessive degree, but as a way to think of my life so far from a completely different angle. I looked into Wicca among other things and took it semi-seriously; for me it wasn’t a way out or an escape, but merely an anchor to get me back on the path I needed to take. My new girlfriend and I both got into it to an extent, but neither of us were heavy practitioners; we were merely thinking of alternate ways to look at life.

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Mixtape, Crazy Little Thing Called WAUGH!!! Vol 5, created April 1994. The fifth mix in the WAUGH!! series continues with the ‘sourced from other people’s record collections’ theme with the occasional oddball single or b-side I enjoyed. I didn’t listen to this one all that much but it did contain a special bit: ten minutes of peeping baby frogs recorded by my sister from the swamp across from my family’s house! Heh.

Mixtape, Two Thousand OST, created April 1994. Signs are always good that it’s going to be a successful writing project, or at least one I’d focus on for a length of time, when I make a mixtape for it! In this case, I took a bunch of my favorite 90s tracks of the time and threw them together as an ultimate GenX mixtape to inspire the story. There’s also a single side of classic rock here: this was a side story in which the lead character’s band is known to do oddball cover songs during their live shows. I would eventually trunk this novel, but the mixtape is still worth it!

The Offspring, Smash, released 8 April 1994. This SoCal punk band had been around for ages, but this was their breakthrough, so huge that it helped label Epitaph gain some much-needed funds to expand their own catalog. “Come Out and Play” was on super heavy rotation on WFNX, and soon came the follow-up radio hits “Gotta Get Away” and “Self Esteem”. Three years later they’d jump to major label Columbia and stay there for the next several years.

Oasis, “Supersonic” single, released 11 April 1994. The Gallagher brothers entered the Britpop scene with this swaggering single and they were an immediate hit on both sides of the Atlantic. I wouldn’t get into them for another few singles, but this is definitely a hell of a fine debut.

Gigolo Aunts, Flippin’ Out, released 12 April 1994. This power pop band was a favorite of the Boston indie crowds, and “Cope” got a significant amount of airplay on both WFNX and WBCN. The album cover is known for featuring a pre-fame Chloe Sevigny, who was a friend of the band.

Hole, Live Through This, released 12 April 1994. A hell of a fine record and one that seemed to hit a little too close to the mark, as it was released just days after her husband Kurt Cobain had died by suicide. It does stand on its own, however, with several great tracks on it that got significant airplay on indie radio.

Pulp, His ‘n’ Hers, released 18 April 1994. A pre-“Common People” minor hit for the band in the UK, they did get a hint of play here but not nearly as much as they deserved. This was their first on a much larger label (Island) which helped them get heard.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Let Love In, released 19 April 1994. I’m pretty sure I skipped this album for the time being as I just couldn’t get myself prepped for the dark and brooding Cave at this point in my life, but the soon to be ubiquitous “Red Right Hand” surfaced here and has been one of his most well known songs to date.

Blur, Parklife, released 25 April 1994. This, on the other hand, was an album I was looking forward to! After the moodiness of Modern Life is Rubbish, this new record was loud, perky, and full of humor and classic British quirkiness. It’s one of their best.

The Smithereens, A Date with the Smithereens, released 26 April 1994. This was an album that sadly got overlooked and forgotten due to several events: getting dropped from Capitol, the inability to get Butch Vig to produce them, and not quite fitting in with the grunge scene. And yet it’s a great record full of their trademark guitar rock and blues, well worth checking out.

Live, Throwing Copper, released 26 April 1994. This record was a long time in coming, their last album having dropped over two years previous, and many wondered if they were going to continue their tight yet now-aging earnest guitar pop sound. Fans and critics were both surprised by the outcome: heavy guitars, heavy subject matter, and an in-your-face sound that showed just how powerful they’d become as a band. It’s an amazing record with several radio hits including “I Alone”, “Selling the Drama”, “All Over You”, “Lightning Crashes” and the epic closer “White, Discussion”. This one got a lot of listens during my writing sessions for Nocturne.

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Coming up: a hot summer begins and a sweltering apartment inspires an important change in a story idea.

Thirty Years On: Slacker Central, Part XII

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So here we were, finishing up the last month of 1993, putting to bed whatever my life had been over the last several years, but having no idea what to do next. Or rather, kinda sorta knowing, but having little to no ability to reach for it and being extremely aware that I could be easily distracted and influenced? Yes, I was well aware of the mental and emotional issues I had at the time, and yet I felt I had to function with them regardless, having very few available spoons to figure them out and make them retreat.

Still — on those quieter days and evenings where I sat down at my table and played around with a possible new universe to write in, that’s when I was most at peace with myself. That was what I wanted to do, and I would need to learn how to harness it, keep it in mind and keep it alive.

Distractions and all.

Ramones, Acid Eaters, released 1 December 1993. This was a bit of an odd detour for the band, who’d decided to release an album full of garage band influences. It didn’t get much positive attention but regardless, it’s got some really fun covers on it.

Underworld, dubnobasswithmyheadman, released 1 December 1993. I remembered this band from 1988 when they came out with the synthpoppy song “Underneath the Radar”. I did not expect them to immerse themselves so deeply into the growing techno scene. They didn’t get much airplay on WFNX except on their weekend electronic show, and “Cowgirl” was a big favorite not to mention the biggest flipping earworm ever!

Cocteau Twins, Snow EP, released 1 December 1993. I wouldn’t have expected the band to record Christmas songs like this, but they’re just as light and heartfelt and enjoyable as you’d expect them to be! WFNX used to play “Frosty the Snowman” a lot as it’s the best of the two tracks and the one that closely mirrors their own style.

Mixtape, Untitled V, created December 1993. This one’s interesting in that it mirrors two different previous Untitled mixes: one from earlier in the year, full of recent purchases that reflect my changing musical tastes, and one from 1989 where I purposely made one side loud and the other one soft. Because of this it became one of my favorite mixtapes and one I’d listen to quite a bit over several years.

Enigma, The Cross of Changes, released 6 December 1993. “Return to Innocence” was the other big hit by this band and one that would get airplay everywhere, from pop to alternative stations and beyond to several movie and television soundtracks. It proved that they weren’t just a one-hit wonder with their world-meeds-techno groove.

Deep Forest, Deep Forest, released 14 December 1993. …and on the coattails of Enigma came this group, full of ambient chillwave grooves and ethnocentric samples. This was a style that would hit its apex within a few years before sliding back into obscurity, but for awhile they were just as prevalent as Enigma if not more so. “Sweet Lullaby” was a big hit for alternative and AOR radio.

*

I literally ended the year working my shift at the Coop, heading down the slushy sidewalks towards the E Line and listening to WFNX’s Top 101 of the year that started just about when I punched out. I missed maybe the first half hour of songs but made it back to the apartment to listen to the countdown and of course tape it, the first time I’d done that in years. This was also the first time I’d spent New Years’ Eve not with family, partly because of work and partly because I just wanted to see the year out on my own terms.

So what did 1994 have in store for me? Good question. Come January JA would play matchmaker whether I was ready for it or not and one of my more turbulent long-term relationships would commence. On the plus side…I’d continue writing, eventually (and finally) starting the Two Thousand project. It was slow going, but it was at least going in the right direction.

In retrospect, I see now that my dark mood during the Boston post-college years wasn’t just about being poor, directionless and frustrated…but also being acutely aware of my worst habits, tendencies and problems and having little or no way to fix them or figure them out other than through sheer fucking stubborn will. It would take another couple of years and personal events before I’d climb out of that morass and make my way into something more positive and healthy.

And also in retrospect, even though a lot of what came out in 1993 is inexorably tied with those moods, I can listen to a lot of this now and accept that there were some really great records that became not just personal favorites but major influences in my life and my writing.

So all in all…1993 wasn’t all that bad. It just kind of sucked in certain ways. But I survived, and that’s what matters most.