Songs For Your Day

I possess only five mix tapes.  They were all made by the same person, because nobody else has ever made me a mix good enough to keep.  Now that I’ve been back for a little while, and am in possession of the necessary technologies, I am jonesing to reciprocate with a mix tape melangé by my very own bibliographically-oriented brain.

A good mix should, in my opinion, be concise, varied, terse, demonstrative more of what the mixer believes than what the listener expects, and compact (I’m really strict on the length of a mix; I recommend no more than fourteen tracks because after that it takes a real time investment to listen to the whole thing at once, which I usually like to do; this time investment sounds nice in theory, but is inefficient and burdensome in practice).  A mix tape, as I’m sure all you loyal readers know, is not only a snapshot of a person’s aesthetic taste, but also a guide to said person’s world view, illuminating, whether implicitly or explicitly, the mixer’s stance on issues ranging from politics to desirable careers to beliefs on the requitability/existence of true love.  It is inherently vain to make a mix, and we should not shy from that, because it is a vanity fused with pure and joyful generosity.

While whittling and arranging the current mix, I’ve encountered a problem I’m sure many mixers are familiar with: conscious but unintentional artist repetition.

Depending on what theme or motif you want to emphasize in your mix, it’s easy to find many songs from the same artist/group that satisfy that theme, for obvious reasons.  For this current mix the motif is origin/rebirth.  Thus I am finding quite a few tracks on my first draft list by two artists at the base of my music appreciation: Willie Nelson and Lucinda Williams.

Willie and I go way back.  I’ve seen him in concert five times, and when I was a child his name was among my first words.  Mom says I used to run around the house while “On the Road Again” played, shouting “Nillie Wilson” (close enough).  The man is too legendary to be properly discussed here, at least concisely, so I’ll just say this: it is un-American to dislike Willie Nelson.

And but so Lucinda.  I did some research and found out that her first album came out in 1979, but that despite critical acclaim and a small cult following, she didn’t really blow up until 1998, with the album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.  I was thirteen when it came out, and trying very hard to avoid my musical destiny by listening to a lot of that Rap music all those kids were crazy about.  My mom had around this time turned away from the Ray Charles, Rod Stewart, and Linda Rondstadt she’d been slamming and gotten religiously back into country music (she must have been having an origin/rebirth moment as well).  Willie’s back catalog began to flood our household music collection, as well as Car Wheels.  We’d never heard or heard of Lucinda Williams, but we took that chance.  It must have been kismet.  It was the album that put me back on track.

It’s an incredible album.  Her electric guitars are dirty and loud, her vocals are gritty as the gravel road she drives down, with the occasional smooth patch.  The album rocks, sways,  and stops twirling in the middle of the night to gaze inwardly at a personal waning moon.  “I Lost It” is my favorite of the rockers.  I listen and I see Lucinda singing full throated, slightly distraught, but too goddamn stubborn to let it get her down.  “Jackson” could inspire a break-up road trip as the best medicine.  “Greenville” may be the prettiest country song of all time.  She opens picking on the acoustic, her vocals subdued, cool, like a rock under clear water.  Then the tambourine drops a small, spaced beat as another voice provides harmony.  The bass is perfect.  A shaker comes in.  Then my favorite drum sound ever, the simple clean snick of the stick against the metal rim of the snare, just as she shifts the lyrics into second gear.

The relevance to the mix thing is now that I want to put these three songs on the mix I also want to put every great song from every great album she’s made since.  “Lonely Girls” from her 2001 effort Essence.  “Are You Alright?” from 2007’s West, which kind of ups the melancholy that “Greenville” hints at.  And of course, “Real Love” from ’08’s Little Honey, a logical extension of “I Lost It,” the extension being that now, well, she’s found it.

Like the Ryan Adams that still gives me the warm feeling of tending the fire at a corn roast, Lucinda’s music is just so purely American I can’t help but to love it.  It’s where I started, and it’s what kept me grounded when I was so far away.  It’s a baseball game and a hot dog, an apple pie and The Wave.  And I hope, of course, that the recipient of this wonderfully under-construction mix will be moved by it just as I am.

-a.s