mixtape (june 2009)

Candy floss and shady Swedish houses
REM “Parakeet”
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone “Natural Light”
Au Revoir Simone “Take Me As I Am”
Luna “Into The Fold”
Kath Bloom “Come Here”
His Clancyness “Nothing and Nowhere To Go”
Richard Swift “Buildings In America”
Wilco “Alone (Shaking Sugar)”
Iron & Wine “My Lady’s House”
The Wooden Birds “The Other One”
Mojave 3 “Starlight #1”
Okkervil River “A King And Queen”
Deradoorian “This is the Heart Now”
M. Ward “Involuntarily”
Grizzly Bear “Two Weeks”
The National “Apartment Story”

Uninhabitable daydreams: I was going to write down some of my random thoughts on Alain de Botton’s recent The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (well, a serviceable read) but one of the local dailies beat me to it by a whisker, last Sunday. But I hope I’m the first to recommend to you Albert Sanchez Pinol’s Pandora in the Congo (2008), the best new fiction out of all I read in the first half of this year – I was completely entranced by this Spanish writer’s incorrigible humor and relentless imagination. But back to this whole thing about using music to unburden oneself from the vagaries of work life, that I alluded to vaguely in my last Sigur Ros post. This latest mixtape is a soft one perhaps, the song choices and sequencing dictated by those moments of uninhabited (or uninhabitable) daydreams experienced ever so briefly when stuck for long hours in a dreary job. Two songs here capture this sort of vibe particularly well, I thought, one a bit older and the other brand new. I remember reading somewhere (though I might have gotten some parts of the anecdote wrong) that Dean Wareham wrote “Into The Fold” about a junkie dude he tried unsuccessfully to check into rehab one rainy morning, a friend who later stole some of his records from his home - the song itself is tender, forgiving and lovely. “Two Weeks”, from the Grizzly Bear album recently released, not only sound awesome but Ed Droste’s lyrics are pretty evocative as well, even when singing about something as mundane as saving up the obligatory 14 vacation days: "Save up all the days, a routine malaise/ Just like yesterday I told you I would stay".