Late morning melancholy, don't leave the house until evening, walk around stunned, wandering and wondering. Dreaming of who you were when you were becoming who you are.
A Mix on Mixcloud called Strange Parade
I don’t know exactly what I want this “newsletter” to do, yet. So, here’s a mixtape.
As much as I say (to myself) that writing is the only thing I care about, and then I go, OK, and beer (I’m also a beer nerd), and Kaden, and Scampy…
What I really care about is music. I only write fiction because I don’t make music.
Amber loves this mix, and that’s all that matters, right?
I want to play you some songs I love. On Valentine’s last year, Kaden got us a subscription to NTS because we’d been listening to it every day for years. In November, I submitted this mix to the NTS Supporter Radio open call for mixes on the theme of Dream, but it did not get selected. I was saying, if I got a show on NTS, even a Supporter mix (I subscribe), that would be more valuable to me than getting my fiction published. I was slightly put out that I didn’t get selected, but when I heard the mixes that did get selected, I was like OK FINE.
Even though I did not get on, I’m really proud of this one. It is a distilled version of a 90-minute mixtape I made Kaden. Notably missing are The Pointer Sisters covering Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” and Donny Hathaway doing “Jealous Guy,” two of my all-time favorite covers. I paired Hathaway’s “Jealous Guy,” with the Beatles doing “Child of Nature” because they’re actually the same song. All three I heard for the first time on NTS in the past year. There are a few other additions and subtractions. “Strange Parade” isn’t on the tape, but it became the title track.
Pretend I made you a mix tape. This is the letter I wrote to tell you about the tracklist.
Weed Demon by Wavves – the best mixes ever made (besides maybe that one by John Fahey) are Bradford Cox’s Micromixes he posted on the Deerhunter website in…I don’t know, 2011? 2009? We have most of them downloaded on the “old laptop” (I’m sure you also have one of these). They were like, the original NTS for us, the first place we started hearing some shit we hadn’t heard before, even before Loie on KAOS. There was this music desert for us between about 2004-2010? We were still buying CDs and records, but it was all older stuff, we were just completely retrograde, bulking up our collection from the 20th century. So anyway. Bradford Cox brought us “Weed Demon” on a Micromix and there is this video of him being “interviewed” at some music festival and he’s super sick and feverish and spinning around in an office chair going “Waaaaavvvves.” I can’t listen to Wavves without thinking of that. This song is a perfect little gem of weirdness. And it’s called “Weed Demon” which is basically my favorite two words to see together.
Hey Goodbye by Matcha Loved Bedhead – this was on a mix Kaden made when he was in high school. Because he was the goddamningest music nerd who ever goddamned. I’ll have to tell you Kaden’s story someday. It’s wild.
Ginger by Wand – I think one time this song lost out horribly in some bracket voting for Wand’s best song or something. This is from Plum. Wand’s earlier record 1000 Days was an album whose cover I loved first, before I’d ever heard the band, and I was so delighted that it sounded exactly like it looked. I’ve seen Wand play twice, once in Olympia and once in Vancouver BC. I was alone at the Olympia show and it was really small. I remember being like “wow, these dudes are just dudes.” At the Vancouver show I got too drunk to remember much of it, except at soundcheck they were playing Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” and it was pretty much the best thing that ever happened. But this song, “Ginger,” what a little bit of magic. It’s a perfect song.
1st Street by Tara Jane O’Neil – I first heard this when I worked at this really nasty little gift shop in downtown Olympia my first year after high school graduation. It was so bad I went back to working at McDonald’s after a year. But one cool guy worked there, and he would put this CD on. Kaden thinks this song is terribly sad, but I don’t find this song sad at all! It’s a really special song. I can’t believe someone came up with it. Someone thought of this and was able to execute it. That just blows my mind, absolutely. I saw Tara Jane O’Neil play at Homo a Gogo in Olympia in 2002. She was wearing red leather gloves, unless I’m making that up. Later she was in The King Cobra, who Victoria and I went to see all the time around 2004, 2005?
Strange Parade by Atlas Sound – something to know about me is that I was really, really obsessed with Bradford Cox around 2013. I write about this in my perzine/fanzine “It’s All Right.” At some point, Bradford Cox posted a shit ton of demo style stuff, one-offs, of his work. Called it Bedroom Database. I consumed them like confections. This one has always been my favorite. I always imagine it being about The Stick in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, deciding to go outside for the first time. Fuck.
Untitled by Galaxie 500 – omg I love Galaxie 500, particularly this album, so much. It took probably 12 years or something to figure out that I loved it more than Kaden loved it.
Marigold by Nirvana – if you haven’t done a deep dive into Nirvana “rarities and b-sides,” may I recommend a phase of it. There is so much out there! We were BLESSED to be around people who collected Nirvana “rarities and b-sides,” also inheriting one burned CD from a friend whose boyfriend took off with a ton of their money but left behind his mega CD wallet. We called it G.’s Ex’s Nirvana Rarities – super clever name. I would have first heard this song on there. Nirvana are weirder than you give them credit for, I promise. I am reminded of this every year that I grow older and have heard more, weirder music. They’re also one of the only bands whose live performances I actually want to listen to. If anyone ever asks you to name 3 Nirvana songs, you should definitely say “Marigold.” It’s so much nicer than “Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip” or “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” or “Moist Vagina.” **note - someone played this on NTS on a shoegaze/ambient show just this week and I’m like…damn.
Heroin by Lou Reed – Lou Reed’s 1965 Demos are all old timey and it’s just – we’re so lucky to have them reissued, man. I love the extra couplets in this version. “All the do-gooders with their frowns / and all the bodies piled up in mounds” hits hard, and he’s so nonchalant about it. It gets to me.
Plain Sailing by Tracey Thorn – I recently learned that Tracey Thorn has a memoir out there, and I want to read it, even though I just said I wasn’t going to read any more memoirs after I finish slogging through Thurston Moore’s (I love it but it’s long). I was a kid in the 90s, I knew of Everything but the Girl. When I was older (I mean like, in my 30s) I heard Marine Girls’ “Lure of the Rockpools,” and I was like whaaaaaat. Then I kept hearing this on NTS last summer, and finally figured out it was Tracey Thorn’s solo stuff.
Queen Bee by P.H.F. ft. Clairo – I think I Shazammed this off NTS. It stuck with me. I love that plodding lo-fi thing it does, I love the way off kilter dual vocals. I think maybe this singer is up and coming rn? I keep seeing their name around.
Maryann by Church of Sun – you guys, this is Kim Deal on vocals and this band just like, invited her to record and this was the song she picked to do, there is a post about it on Reddit, how cool is that? I heard it on the Kim Deal special on NTS. It is so jaunty and unadorned. It’s so lusciously spare. It makes me feel so good.
Wiley by Hovvdy – I used to listen to a YouTube channel called Bedroom Fidelity when we first moved to Vancouver [2017], and I heard this song there. It’s so dreamy, almost, almost going into country rock, but it’s too foggy, too misty, too socked in.
Cities in Dust by Siouxsie and the Banshees – when Kell first moved in with us (us here = me and Cree) in 2001, they went out and bought Siouxsie and the Banshees Greatest Hits on CD (I might mean “Singles,” who knows). This was one of the first songs that stood out to me, and it stuck with me all these years. I didn’t remember what it was called and I either didn’t know or didn’t remember what the lyrics were, so I listened to a lot of Siouxsie tracks to find it. What an exquisite piece. It makes me feel so weird, in an unfamiliar way.
Drab Measure by Crack Cloud – I first heard Crack Cloud in 2017 when we lived in Vancouver, on the college radio station. It was “Swish Swash” and I ordered the 7” record it was on, but it took so long to arrive I had completely forgotten about it. Later, I heard this song on NTS and Kaden and I were going – is that Crack Cloud? That’s gotta be Crack Cloud. We Shazammed it and it was. I can’t get enough of this song. I love how the singer’s voice is so snotty and the song is so…gorgeous yet confrontational. I think Crack Cloud are redefining “angular”
(side note: once when I was a teenager this guy told me about the band Red Monkey and he was like “they’re so…angular!” Cree had gone to see Sleater-Kinney at YoYo a GoGo with her girlfriend and my boyfriend when I was visiting my grandparents in 1999 and Red Money were playing and she told me my boyfriend kept calling them “Monkey Spank” to her and her girlfriend which was extra fucked up because he was 26 and they were 16 and 14 (I was also 16). Old Time Relijun were playing that show and I wondered about them for so long. I mean, what an epic show to miss, I still imagine it.)
I Want to Be Adored by The Stone Roses – The bartender was playing this in Le Voyeur sometime in 2015 or 2016 and we loved it so much we actually asked what it was. They were like “the rest of the album sucks tho.” I put this into a story. In “The Filthiest Person Alive,” the narrator falls in love with this song but the rest of the album sucks. Have you ever seen the video? The singer is bopping around like a hippie-raver and it’s so bad. I can’t put the image together with the song.
The Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen – before I had ever consciously heard Echo and the Bunnymen, I knew that Courtney Love grew up intending to become an Echo and the Bunnymen groupie. Like. I knew they had to be special. Did you realize that the theatrical release and director’s cut of Donnie Darko use two different theme songs? I didn’t notice that until I re-watched the theatrical release last season and I was like “wait, where was the INXS song?” “The Killing Moon” wasn’t even the song the director wanted to open with! I freaking LOVE that INXS song (which I only ever heard for the first time on the director’s cut of Donnie Darko); I’m torn on which is the better choice. In the summer, Kaden kept telling me how the songwriter woke from a dream where he had dreamt the line “fate, up against your will,” and had to write the song. This was my song of autumn 2023. I thought about it all the time, I just wanted to listen to it over and over. So I did.
Demons Sing Love Songs by Unwound – I hope you noticed that I began and ended with songs about dancing demons. When I lived in Olympia in 2015, 2016, around the time I first started writing the story that became “Give Me the Keys,” I felt my calling was to paint dancing demons (like on the cover of Wand’s 1000 Days). I did paint some dancing demons. This is a song about singing demons. Fun fact, Sleater-Kinney sing backup vocals on this song. Another fun fact, Kaden has this album on LP from when he was a teenager and it’s worth a lot of money now (but apparently his Julie Ruin record is worth even more). It’s hard to find on the record shelf because it is all black with black type.