Back in June of 2008 I was asked to throw together a muxtape of music by my long-time twitter friend @leftsider that was representative of my ‘taste’ in music. At the time I was going through a lot of ridiculous emo bullshit because this dumb whore up in San Jose was fucking around with my heart and I was being a dumb piece of shit who didn’t want to realize how awesome he was and dump the cunt, so I put together this really sorrowful 12-track playlist.
Back when muxtape was operating as a free-for-all playlist maker, they limited you to 12 tracks, which is why this is much shorter than any other mixtape I’ve put up. It’s been a few months since I’ve made a long running playlist, and I’ve been slowly working on a couple in my head and just need to sit down and do them (one will hopefully be a small history lesson, tracking the origin and progression of psychedelia over the last four decades that I’ve been wanting to do for about six months now, and the other will be a “get pumped up and fuck shit up” playlist) but in the meantime I figured I’d put this one up, ’cause I just stumbled on it.
I listened to it last night and with a few exceptions, the mood of it is quite consistent. Vampire Weekend’s Bryn doesn’t really belong at all. The Dresden Dolls’ The Gardener runs two minutes too long to be acceptable for a mixtape and could be successfully replaced with better album cut The Mouse and the Model. 16 Horsepower’s Outlaw Song is one of my favorite songs of all time but doesn’t fit the theme at all… It’s obvious I just threw this together before I had any inklings of taking playlist/mixtape construction “seriously” (it’s surprising even to me how seriously I take it now).
Either way, a lot of good stuff on here. Bottom of the Hudson’s Riot Act is the best song nobody has heard and once you hear it you should make it your life’s works to expose it to as many people as possible. I think most of these tracks have appeared on here over the years if you want to read about my individual thoughts on them, search for them on the map.
I’m not a Regina Spektor fan. I can’t be: I lack the necessary equipment, namely a vagina, and I am far too self-aware to not feel silly when I listen to the majority of her music. Years ago, when I was barely a teenager and spent a lot of time hiding under my comforter contemplating the never ending pit of sorrow manifesting itself in my navel, I probably would have loved her a lot. As it is, though, she just makes me feel kind of silly. If someone caught me listening to a Regina Spektor record, say, my mother or father came in the room without knocking first, I would feel the same amount of shame that I would if my cock was in my hand and I was pounding at it with the utmost furvor while clown porn lit up my face with whites, reds, and pinks. Hell, perhaps Regina Spektor would bring me more shame.
Regardless, I gave her live show a very nice review, and mentioned in it how this was the song that really got to me, really pulled at my heart strings, and for about a month or two afterward hearing it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. It still kind of does.
I don’t have much to say about this song. It is oblique and sad sounding. I was contemplating reposting something I wrote on my personal site, because the mood between them is similar, but I won’t paste it here. If this post isn’t enough reading for you, I recommend that you check out what I wrote last night in defense of suicide and Andrew Koenig.
Years ago (how many doesn’t matter) Delta Spirit drummer Brandon Young was buying a pack of cigarettes at 2:30 in the morning and heard some guy singing and playing guitar down by the trolley tracks, but what was unusual about this guy was that he actually sounded pretty good, so he got the guys phone number. That guy was Matt Vasquez, the guy you hear singing on this song. When Brandon’s band broke up, he contacted Matt, who was living with five other guys in a two bedroom apartment. It seems like when most people on the internet retell this story they embellish it a little, saying Matt was homeless, but he wasn’t, but I guess it’s fun to think of the story that way if you want.
This song obviously alludes to this history.
It’s also obvious why I like this song: it’s joyous, loud, inspirational, and tugs on that place in your chest that makes you want to stand up and sing along, or at least just pay attention. However, this is one of those albums that suffers from that typical album tradition of putting the best song on the album as the second song. The rest of the album never lives up to the promise of this song, and that is too bad, because an album full of songs this good would have made this album an instant classic.
As it is, this is the one really good song, and now you’ve heard it.
Site Note: Due to having issues with my websites showing up in Google search results for things I do not want my websites showing up in Google search results for, I’ve removed all of them from every search engine. This means that search box that was over there on the side won’t work anymore, but you don’t really need it anyway, so I’ve removed it. Eventually I’ll add it back with a normal search function.
In it her first sentence is, “The year I graduated high school was also the year that Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo: 1997” like I give a fuck or that it is even relevant to anything. Is this interview about your music or what a pretentious ‘tard you can make yourself out to be just in the first thing you say?
“I went to a camp in Massachusetts, where my mom taught music and played for folk dancing. It wasn’t a camp for kids, mostly, but for adults” and that sounds like the kind of place where kids get molested and used in bizarre sex rituals their brains sympathetically force them to forget.
Then there’s “When I was 21 I lived in Kenya and became friends with some hip-hop musicians who lived in Dandora, one of the bigger slums in Nairobi,” who the fuck IS this chick? Were her parents filthy rich or something? We’re just going to fly our child all over the world so she can have this rich bohemian lifestyle and grow up to make indie records after hanging out in slums with black people even though she is a white girl!
As part of that experience she adds, “I would wake up in the morning and go to get these donuts, fried fresh. They were delicious little golden puffs of dough. A whole bag of about 12 for 2 shillings, so like maybe 30 cents. I don’t eat doughy fried things anymore.”
OK, I’m sorry, but there is only one thing I can take away from all this babble: This chick is obviously completely fucking insane and is making all of this up. When you throw that kind of detail into a story when you’re talking about yourself casually to an interviewer there is only one option: you are completely full of shit. Again, I’d hate to come across as super jaded and cynical, but seriously, even Barack Obama doesn’t tell stories this pretentious about himself and he probably has the right to ’cause he’s the fucking President.
Also: “I don’t eat doughy fried things anymore”? So you’re probably a chronic liar and you’re joyless for no reason at all. Fried food is bad! No one eat it! Nevermind that you can eat it and then you can exercise and, you know, keep enjoying fried things because they are tasty and delicious! I mean, if it’s good enough for people living in slums why isn’t it good enough for you?
I would make up some elaborate back story about my awesome bohemian life just to have an example here, something about how I lived in some small country you’re not even sure really exists but you assume it does ’cause I am talking about it, and how I made friends with some of the natives even though I was white and I was sure they were going to give me AIDS if they even touched me, and they played the most bizarre form of jungle hip hop dance music and it was so influential on me when I was 16 and living here by myself because my parents thought I needed to experience what it was like to build houses in impoverished countries and after the first week or two I didn’t even miss running water and there is just something spiritual, you know, about having to boil all your water before you even use it to brush your teeth ’cause they don’t even know what the word potable means, you know, and then I hid in the woods for two years when I was eighteen deep in the forests of Montana with some mountain people, really secluded stuff you know people don’t even you know know these people exist but I sought them out ’cause I am JUST THAT FUCKING COOL so please listen to my music buy my album it’s on a major independent label.
As an aside, I like this song a lot, I think it feels cool and it makes me want to sing. The rest of the album sucks ass. There is no emotion in it, it’s kind of like someone really boring just talking in your ear for an hour and when they’re done talking you realize that even though you were listening you can’t remember a goddamn thing they said. She also rAnDoM CaPs eVeRy SoNg TiTlE wHiCh Is SoMe AnNoYiNg AsS lItTle KiD sHiT sHe ShOuLd Be SlApPeD fOr.
To quote that blog post again: “This leads to an intimate experience, as you get the feeling that you’re listening to some unearthed cassette tapes found in your grandmother’s attic, discovering a lost gem from the past.” Oh fucking please. Any time you listen to an album like that sure it’s all like WOW the first time but then you listen to it a couple more times and you realize why that shit was hidden in your grandmother’s attic never to be heard by anyone ever again: it sucks ass.
Austin-based White Denim is pretty much awesome. This was the first album I listened to this year (released last year) that truly excited me, and it took me twelve straight listens to finally feel like I had over-saturated myself on it. The best way I can describe it is to steal a comment I read elsewhere on the internet: Fits sounds as if the greatest, most talented garage band in the world showed up at your house, set up all their gear in your garage, and all in one take recorded an entirely improvised album right then and there.
They’ll rock your face off. In the first two tracks they are all over the place, at one point pretty much shredding a sick ass riff on a sitar, or at least on something that sounds a lot like a sitar. Since I don’t know shit about music I can’t really say for sure, but I do know one thing: it is pretty much awesome. The song Sex Prayer descends into a lovely stoney groove. El Hard Attack DCWYW pounds your face off. Regina Holding Hands makes you feel totally blissful.
In short, it seems like White Denim can do just about anything they put their mind to, and do it well. This is an album to check out just to see how one band manages to cover so many different styles all on one record without it being overwhelming or annoying. There’s at least five tracks on this album that belong in your shuffle for sure. Blah blah blah.
When I was fifteen, nearly sixteen, I had an online girlfriend who was a Wiccan, or a witch, or just fat and lonely and desperately wanting to believe she wasn’t just crazy and lonely so she claimed to honestly believe in Gods and Goddesses. She lived in Canada, so she was far away enough that I was never in any danger of meeting her. She talked to me about dancing naked in the woods. She sent me pictures of herself and I tried to pretend that wasn’t really her because at this point I still hadn’t really had much of a girlfriend and hadn’t really yet touched a girl but I still put off by fat kinda frumpy girls and she was definitely fat and kind of frumpy, but oddly similar to the woman I’d lose my virginity to—who also claimed to be Wiccan, though on closer inspection she was just crazy.
Like, really crazy. We did ecstasy one night, before we had sex, though she had gone down on me and kept talking about wanting to have sex with me but thought it was wrong because I was fifteen and she was twenty-six, and the ecstasy seemed to have fucked her shit up because she was lying on the ground next to the apartment building pool and was shuddering and flinching claiming dark angels were flying at her and exclaiming that yes she wanted to do things to me but knew she shouldn’t and please just leave her alone. So, of course, the next week, she did those things to me anyway, and by “did those things” I mostly mean that she let me do them to her, so it wasn’t really wrong, really, and the only reason I feel kind of weird about it today is because sometimes she’d lock herself in the bathroom and I’d hear her talking to herself in different voices, and sometimes she’d turn into a little girl in every way but physically and it annoyed the piss out of me because at this point I was seventeen and I was just too old to be putting up with that sort of shit from an twenty-eight year old woman, so I left.
The online girl whose name I can’t remember liked to call herself Nyx, after the Goddess of night, which even back then was one of the stupidest things I had ever heard, but she took me seriously, and while at this point in my life people were mostly taking me seriously (I mean, 400 people a day hit my blog back then, back before people in reality knew what the word “blog” was) she took me really seriously and that was nice, that sort of attention from a girl, so I liked her OK.
I’m sure Nyx and I had cybersex. Did we have phone sex? I don’t remember. If we did I bet it was stupid, not like the phone sex I used to have with that blonde girl in Florida who had to go and break my heart by getting herself pregnant when she was eighteen and I was sixteen. Things didn’t work out too well for her ’cause the guy who got her pregnant married her and joined the Army and years later when she inevitably got fat he was an Army recruiter with a nice body who realized the ladies he was trying to recruit were attractive and had vaginas he could easily put his penis in. These things happen. I remember when she told me on the phone I acted all cool about it, and I was like, “Dang you’re preggers,” and she was like, “I hate that word, preggers, don’t say that,” and I was like, “But you’re preggers.”
Nyx was upset when I told her that I was sorry but if some woman was going to suck my cock in reality then I wasn’t about to pretend I cared two shits about some online relationship. She didn’t talk to me after that. Years later I checked up on her Wiccan Information Supersite and it was gone. I tried messaging her on AIM, mostly out of sick curiosity and she responded to me until I told her it was me and then she never responded to me ever again. Some people just don’t get over shit. I wonder if she’s even alive, still, she was always depressed and suicidal, but if you’re fat and lonely and living in Canada then I suppose you probably would be suicidal so I can’t blame her.
I had another online girlfriend who lived in Canada. She was older than me and sent me nude pictures. Her tits were gigantic and perfect, oh my god, but because we were something like 15 and 16 and the time those pictures are technically child porn so I can’t really look at them anymore, but let me tell you, those tits were not the tits of a 16 year old. Good fucking god, I swear. I’m glad the memories of tits you saw of underaged girls when you, yourself, were underage aren’t something you can be arrested for. I don’t think I’ve seen a grown woman naked in person who had tits like that girl did. Sometimes I wonder if she idly thinks about this: there is some guy in California who has pictures of my naked underage body somewhere that he can’t look at because he’s old enough now that it would weird him out.
Nyx turned me onto this song. I listened to a lot of Laika for a while, but it’s not really my style. I still like this song, though. This entry has nothing at all to do with this song. Around the same time that chick in Canada was sending me pictures of her underaged breasts I used to talk to a 16 year old kid who lived in Oregon who had leukemia. He had an online girlfriend who lived in Ohio named Lisa Haney and Lisa thought I was awesome as hell ’cause I was a giant fan of Nine Inch Nails and, she revealed to me, she always wanted to be a big Nine Inch Nails fan, so I stole her from the kid with leukemia, mostly because I didn’t think he was really a kid with leukemia. He gave me a funny feeling.
When I lived with the older woman who I lost my virginity to, I found out that she had been talking to that kid with leukemia without telling me and it turned out that kid with leukemia was actually a 40 year old man who weighed over 400 lbs and as a result of that he couldn’t move around much and bitched a lot, in private with her, about how he couldn’t go to the movies because he couldn’t fit in the seats, and eventually he lost both of his legs due to diabetes and then died completely sad and alone. The fact that this guy had cybersex and phone sex with a 15 year old girl who lived part way across the country makes me feel like he kind of got what he deserved. I’ve tried, without success, to track down Lisa Haney of Ohio who used to have an online boyfriend named Sam who had leukemia for about a year or two now, just to know that she is still alive, but I’ve never had any success.
I suppose these things happen. I mean, they must, because they did.
It’s four years ago and I’m sitting in my room trying to keep myself calm. I’m telling myself that I’m just being insecure, that my my two prior relationships with women I couldn’t trust even before I got into relationships with them set me up for this kind of insecurity, that I’m doing this to myself because I can’t trust myself because in this situation I’m the one who cheated on her the first time around, so of course I assume she’s evil because everyone says she’s so much like me, and why would she be hanging out with some guy from the internet if it wasn’t to try to find someone better than me? And what if he is better than me? What will stop her from fucking him right then and there without giving me any notice? Of course he’s better than me, who isn’t better than me, and if I were her, I’d do it, I’d fuck him if he was even only a little better than me because after eight months of this even a little better is better enough. I’m driving myself crazy. It’s four years ago and I’m text messaging to see if they’re on their way to the movie they’re supposed to go see.
They’re not, she says, since her mother and grandmother aren’t home they’ve decided to just stay alone in her house and watch a movie and I said, hey, I’m not really OK with that, and she says she doesn’t care if I am not OK with that and that I should relax and be cool because I already said I was cool with it, but when I said that I was lying because I wanted so desperately to be cool with it, not so that she would feel good or think I am cool but because I just wished I was cool with it because it’s not fun for me to be panicking that my girlfriend is going to fuck some other guy from the internet and perhaps if I lie to her I’ll believe the lie myself and just enjoy a night by myself and besides these days I mostly kind of hate her but without her I’ll just be alone and it’s four years ago and I don’t yet have the confidence necessary to realize that finding another woman isn’t hard at all. It’s four years ago and temporarily all my hatred for her drains away into an explicable need and even though I calm down for the couple of seconds it takes me say whatever do what you want I’m cool as soon as I hang up I am heading outside and getting into my car and driving over to house and for what purpose I don’t know but maybe it’ll show her that I love her so much she doesn’t need to hang out with some other guy and she’ll kick him out and instead we’ll sit on her couch and watch a movie and be a happy couple again. It’s four years ago and I’m still lying to myself not even in an attempt to make myself look better in her eyes and it still isn’t working.
I see his car outside her house and I briefly contemplate keying it or maybe taking a shit on it or something else that doesn’t really make sense and I later learn the guy was smart and that wasn’t his car at all and his actual car was parked several houses down the street but I do nothing anyway because that is what I do. It’s four years ago and this guy is younger than I am now and the perspective I have now makes me not feel like blaming him necessarily because tail is tail and he didn’t really know what he was doing and even if he did I can’t blame him because I probably would do the same thing now if I had never changed from being the asshole I was four years ago, the asshole he is now four years ago sitting inside my girlfriend’s house on the couch watching television and I can see him through the blinds and they’re sitting on opposite sides of the couch and I feel relieved but I walk back to my car and I call her anyway. She calls me crazy and I say that it’s not crazy to be upset when your girlfriend is locked in her house alone with some guy and won’t come outside to talk to her upset boyfriend who she is supposed to love. She says she wont come outside and that I need to go away and what do I hope to accomplish and I say I just want to know that she loves me and it’s obvious she doesn’t but she tells me she does, she tells me she loves me and she won’t do anything to hurt me and she’s just going to watch a movie and leave and she hangs up.
It’s four years ago and this still isn’t enough for me so I drive down the street a bit and park where I can still see her house and I wait and talk to a girl living in Tennessee through my phone and she tells me over and over again that if she were me she’d just walk away and not even bother, that it’s obvious what is happening and I say I don’t want to believe it, that I want to be wrong, that I want to be crazy and paranoid and I want to see him leave, but two hours later when the movie is surely over and my phone is dead and I am simply feeling like a creepy guy sitting on a street late at night he still hasn’t left and at this point I’ve already pissed into a plastic water bottle and now I’m starting to feel like I am going to shit myself so my head clears for a moment and I think: I’m being silly. I’ll just walk up to the house and knock on the door and say, I’m sorry for being silly, but can I use the bathroom and then I’ll go home, oh and by the way why hasn’t he left yet, what is going on in there?
It’s four years ago and when I get to the door before I knock I think I better look in through the blinds again and I see that the living room is completely empty and my heart drops into my stomach and my body starts to shake so I walk around behind the house and the dog that always barks at me and everyone else doesn’t bark but sniffs me in an unusually friendly way as I open the gate and walk around the back of the house, over to the side yard, and up to her bedroom window. It’s four years ago and when I peer through her blinds I see her lying in bed with him.
It’s four years ago and he’s shirtless and she’s not wearing any pants or underwear and he’s kissing my girlfriend and he’s got his hand buried between her legs and it’s four years ago and I knock on the window and it’s four years ago and I’m completely alone in this and it’s four years ago and sometimes when a sad song comes on I relive all these feelings all at once and it’s four years from now and I still won’t forget what it feels like to be so betrayed but it’s right now and I don’t blame anyone or dwell on it because in the end everyone gets what they deserve even if there isn’t any God or Karma to make sure it happens, it just happens, because bad people invite bad things into their lives and what is what it really is so if you’re tired of bad things happening to you the only solution is to stop doing bad things to other people and if you’re too stupid to figure this out then you’re only getting what you’ve been asking for all along. It’s right now and bad things do not happen to me anymore.
Welcome to staires! I'm just a dude living around Los Angeles who listens to a lot of music and wants to tell you about it. Read more?
If this is your first time here, welcome! I've been doing this for a while now, so check out the old stuff! Please email me with recommendations (or self-promotion) at any time!
If you are the owner of one of the songs I have posted here and aren't happy that I posted it, you can email me and ask me to take it down. Before you do, please notice I don't let people download the music (sorta) and actively encourage them to buy it. The idea is that people buy your music after hearing it, not steal it from here.
