Three Uses of the Knife

Three Uses of the Knife

When Jake asked me to make a new mix last week I was genuinely flattered. I really enjoy my mixes, but I bring a whole host of thoughts and emotions to each song that I sometimes wonder if the reasons I’ve included them and placed them where I have “make sense” to anyone else. Over the years I’ve made a few mixes people seem to like, and I’ve made some real clunkers. Most famously (in my mind) an ambitious 2 CD (I mean really 148 minutes?) manifesto made in 2005 featuring equal parts hip hop, electronica, folk music, and the majority of a This American Life episode called “Secret Government” (Which by the way was excellent, remains incredibly prescient, and was an harbinger of the muckraking turn the program would take during the 2008 financial crisis). You can tell just from the description it was kind of a disaster. I made Elisabeth Leeflang listen to it on our way up to Brighton to do some night skiing and she told me I’d failed. She was right, so I shelved it. 

With all that’s going on I was kinda worried I’d be too zeitgeisty and in my experience that’s asking for trouble (see above). I also considered resurrecting a mix I started in the euphoria and sun soaked / pre PTSD months following completion of residency. As I gathered material I realized that was also asking for trouble. I tried to do a thing in terms of narrative and structure here, but I won’t bore you or hit you over the head with it. If you see it/ hear it great, if not, no big deal. I think the tracks work well without anything else so I’ve decided against talking too much about it. 

It is super long. 30 songs long, and there are multiple instances of multiple songs from a single artist/group which feels like breaking a cardinal rule of mixtape construction, but in the end I think it’s well paced, not too light or heavy, and I think you’ll appreciate the exceptions. I hope you enjoy it.

1. The Race For Space – Public Service Broadcasting – Yes, that’s JFK speaking at Rice University in my hometown. With all the social changes, struggles, and conflicts of the 60s, the moon landing seems like cherry-picking a bright spot of hope. A bright spot of hope in a turbulent, frightening world teetering on the brink of self-annihilation. Not totally irrelevant.
2. Building Steam with a Grain of Salt – DJ Shadow – From his legendary 1996 record Endtroducing. I’m coming perilously close to running out of tracks on this album that haven’t been used on mixtapes.  I first heard this album in September 1999, and it hasn’t gone completely out of rotation since.
3. The Hook – Stephen Malkmus – Who doesn’t love songs about the pirate life?
4. Mississippi Saturday Night – Old Crow Medicine Show – By this point everyone on the planet has heard Wagon Wheel, but OCMS have so many great songs and albums, and we all need more harmonica in our lives.
5. Who’s Feeling Young Now? – Punch Brothers – After the last decade this is a legitimate question. 
6. My Body – Young The Giant – Not gonna lie, sometimes when I’m having a great day skiing and it’s getting late and my muscles are aching, and there’s not as much spring in my turns and I need a pick me up to make one, or two, or five more trips down the mountain, this song may be summoned. It has yet to fail me. 
7. Shempi – Ratatat – There was once a time when I would range the roads of Johnson County Iowa on my bicycle 40-50 miles at a time, and the majority of those miles were spent with Ratatat pumping. Sun and sweat soaking my skin, legs and lungs burning, and rows and rows and rows and rows of corn.
8. Animal – Miike Snow – That organ. 
9. The Bait – Electric Guest – Their album Mondo is back to back to back great tracks. If you haven’t had the pleasure yet you should. Also the video for this song is exactly what it should be.
10. My Oh My – Punch Brothers – It is genuinely unfair that Chris Thile can not only play an instrument as well as he can, and can compose such great original material, and then can provide vocals to boot. He is a great artist and performer and if you ever have the means and opportunity I think you should make the effort to do so.
11. Big Time In The Jungle – Old Crow Medicine Show – Arguably the 3rd best song from their 2nd best album, and it’s still a better song than many bands could ever hope to produce. 
12. Missed the Boat – Modest Mouse – Not my favorite song by the group, but I think it fits the mood of where we’re at in the mix, also it features Johnny Marr of The Smith’s so there’s that.
13. Skyscrapers – OK Go – This song is very different from the majority of their work, but still has a nice groove. The last 2 minutes are worth the price of admission. The live version on 180/365 is even better, but I’ll let you enjoy it on your own.
14. Control – Broken Bells – James Mercer’s lyrics, vocals and Guitars, coupled with Dangermouse’s beats? Yes please.
15. Idaho – Josh Ritter – I’m approaching 16 years of fanhood. I grow to love all of his albums. Some are easy to love and are great gateway drugs – Hello Starling, Historic Conquests, Sermon on the Rocks, and some are acquired tastes. The more time passes the more I love The Animal Years. The meanings of songs and the album morph and blossom as I age. I’ve spent very little time in Idaho, but Josh grew up there, and when he played this in Boise it was special. This particular recording is from Dublin, and if he can turn out a performance like this across an ocean and a continent, you can imagine what he can do with his parents in the audience. 
16. Alone – Trampled by Turtles – You know those songs you love for very specific moment of catharsis they provide? Add this to the list.
17. Lay Me Down – The Frames – I first heard this song as part of the soundtrack to Bill Heath’s cinematic masterpiece “Sinners”. That movie changed my life. The song has haunting beauty that is undeniable, but when you combine it with the images on screen it is really something.
18. You Would Have To Lose Your Mind – The Barr Brothers – It’s good to have a few songs with the ethereal quality on display here for slow walks or drives on lazy afternoons. I’ve got all the mileage I can from The Dandy Warhols “13 Tales From Urban Bohemia” in terms of mixtape content (it remains an all time “desert island” album for me), and Spotify threw this song my way a while back and I think the algorithm done good.
19. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate – The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin is another all time “desert island” album for me. I’m fairly certain I’ve used a track from it on like 50% of mixtapes I’ve made in the past 20 years. I figure our heart rates were a little lower at this point, and I thought we’d push that vide a bit more.
20. Facing East – Thievery Corporation – After being lulled for the last 3 tracks I tried to be gentle with the “wake up” songs. I love this one. Thievery Corp is really great long walks late at night music.
21. Marching The Hate Machines Into The Sun – Thievery Corp. Featuring Wayne Coyne -Thievery Corp + The Flaming Lips? How could I deprive y’all of that? This song’s a double cheat.
22.   Do Wrong Right – The Devil Makes Three – I’m sure this says more about me than I really should share, but I absolutely LOVE turning this song up loud and singing along with it in my car with the windows down.
23. Tension – Todd Snider – Oh Man this was a tough choice. I honestly couldn’t choose between this song and Statistician’s Blues, but The pacing on this one is better, and the grins are a bit bigger and guffaws a bit louder.
24. Babylon – Interrupters – I’m pretty sure this song got pushed to me by the mighty algorithm because of my love of Rancid and The Clash. Strong work mathematics.
25. Kiss Off – The Violent Femmes – To be honest, the definitive version of this song can be found on their 1993 retrospective Add It Up. Gordon’s vocals have more bite, the guitar is more sinister, the drumming is more urgent, and the backing vocals from both the band and audience put it out of the reach of any other recording I’ve heard. Do yourself a favor and give it a listen. This original is fine, its just not the same and I couldn’t find the one I wanted on spotify. Life is hard.
26. Thin Blue Flame – Josh Ritter – There’s just something about slow burns building toward pounding inevitably that I really enjoy. It’s worth noting this song was written in the deepest part of the quagmire of the war in Iraq with Afghanistan still smoldering in the background and consequently gets to a very dark place. I find the lyrics arresting and challenging. 15 years later the content of the latter half of the song still feels aspirational.
27. Punchline – The Farewell Drifters – Stacy and I turned on the TV one day and Bluegrass Underground was on. I don’t know what we intended to watch, but we never made it there. We stayed tuned for the remainder of the set. Then I bought the album. 
28. This Year – The Mountain Goats – I’ll be honest here I don’t know the Mountain Goats catalog as well as I should, but most of what I’ve heard I enjoy. I’ll admit I chose this track over others because the last month has felt so long. I love the imagery of these lyrics. This song reminds me of how Less Than Jake’s “Hello Rockview” made me feel when I was seventeen years old.
29. The Other Side – Public Service Broadcasting – The climax of this album, and of the Apollo program is/was the Apollo 11 landing. While “Go!” is a great song, I genuinely believe this one is better and more triumphant. I’ve recently been making my way through the American Experience miniseries Chasing the Moon. They interviewed the woman who was in charge of lunar orbit insertion. What you don’t get from this song is that the period of “loss of signal” was longer than anticipated, and in the setting of the early failures of the space program combined with the struggles of Gemini and the fatal fire of Apollo 1, the mood in mission control was pretty tense, and the relief and elation once signal was reacquired was genuine. While landing on and returning from the moon was obviously a big deal, seeing the dark side of the moon for the first time in human history followed by an “Earth rise” must have been a real trip. 
30. Laundry Room – The Avett Brothers – This was the most difficult song to place. I could fit it into several places in the mix. I initially had it near the tail end of act 3, then moved it up to the first track, and I suppose I’m kinda stuck with it now as coda. Music and memory can do funny things. They can instantly transport you to a different time and place. A lot of these songs do that for me, and so it feels like I’m a breathing time machine. I hope you’ve all enjoyed the ride.