I’m no Nick Hornby but his affections for football, music and literature are ones that I hold as well. In Hornby’s book High Fidelity, he writes about the art of the mixtape:
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.
The purpose of this mixtape is to introduce you to some new music to you — that’s the main rule I’m trying to follow, but you should notice a certain flow to the music. And by new, I mean out in the last year or two — most of the music has been released in 2009, several from 2008 and a couple of older songs. The price links you to Amazon Digital Downloads. Oh yeah, do I need to tell you that some of these songs might not be safe for work? I’ll assume your smart enough to figure that out on your own.
1. Fever Ray – When I Grow Old from Fever Ray (video) ($6.99)
2. Metric – Help, I’m Alive from Fantasies (video) ($5.00)
3. Bon Iver – Blood Bank from Blood Bank EP (video) ($3.89)
4. Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks from Vekatimest (video) ($8.99)
5. Cursive – From the Hips from Mama, I’m Swollen (video) ($8.99)
6. Hold Steady – Chips Ahoy! from Boys and Girls in America (video) ($7.99)
7. Drive-by Truckers – The Righteous Path from Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (video) ($11.99)
8. Lucinda Williams – Drunken Angel from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (video) ($9.49)
9. Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma from Vampire Weekend (video) ($9.99)
10. The Spinto Band – Summer Grof from Moonwink (video) ($7.99)