Twenty summers ago, I made my last ever mixtape—that is, a music mix on a C-90 cassette as opposed to a blank compact disc. A few months earlier, I had acquired my very first laptop computer (dude, I got a Dell) which allowed me to make the move from analog to digital.
By late July 2003, I had a few mix CDs under my belt but circumstance gave me an excuse to make one more mixtape. In my hometown of Milwaukee, I met up with my parents (who then lived in Iowa) for three nights; then, I spent another six nights with my friend Laura, a Chicago native whom I met as a student at Marquette University some years before. I’d moved to Boston shortly after graduation but she stayed on. Between her job at a nursery and other family commitments, I was left alone roughly half of that time to apartment-sit, see other old friends and explore the city I’d left behind. Laura lived on the East Side just off Oakland Ave and I had a blast visiting all the old haunts, from the Oriental and Downer Theatres to Bradford Beach, Atomic Records and even Klode Park out in Whitefish Bay.
With ample time on my hands, I curated a mixtape for Laura as a thankful gesture for putting me up. I had brought an entire Case Logic 128-capacity CD wallet with me stuffed with all-time faves, recent purchases and a few discs I had to review for Splendid!, a music website I wrote for at the time; I may have also schlepped a blank tape with me purposely for this task. Laura was (and continues to be) a friend I make mixes for on an annual basis, going all the way back to our senior year at MU when we first bonded as friends and I crafted her a tape she dubbed the “Kriofske Mix” (a moniker I lent to two of my (now former) blogs.)
Revisiting this mix two decades on, I feel transported back to my late 20’s, an primordial era where I apparently thought nothing of including two songs by Ani DiFranco, two tracks from the Punch-Drunk Love soundtrack, an album cut from The White Stripes’ then-new Elephant (my #2 album of that year, I haven’t listened to it in at least 15) and the gauzy opener from Blur’s then-new Think Thank (also not heard in full in a long, long time.) I had also recently gotten into The Go-Betweens, The New Pornographers and Mary Lou Lord—hearing what I selected from each again reminds me what it was like to discover an artist one connected with so instantly you’d rush out and devour their back catalog piece by piece depending on what you could find in (for me, mostly used) record stores.
Among these twenty tracks, six are from albums I reviewed for Splendid! Required to write about everything from obnoxious prog-rock to near-ambient mood music, they’re scattered across that range: Paul Brill’s genre-expanding take on Americana, Natacha Atlas doing the same for world music (and sounding entirely different), Northern State (a clever and disarmingly low-fi distaff Beastie Boys), two cuts from a compilation for a record label helmed by a member of the Cocteau Twins (including the title track above) and an a capella cover of a Pixies song on TV On The Radio’s debut EP, so new-sounding and exceptional I wasn’t surprised by the mass-acclaim their second LP Return To Cookie Mountain received three years later.
True to titular form, there’s a loose and fairly obvious summer theme going on here. My favorite section is the last five songs—“You Had Time” sets the pensive, reflective mood (much better than the other DiFranco selection, anyway) and Jeff Buckley’s dreamy, ethereal cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (which I listened to about 100 times that summer) runs with it, sustained by another old-school Stuart Murdoch reverie. Somehow, the contrasting tones of Shelley Duvall and Tunde Adebimpe just fit right in. I often cringe at mixes I made decades ago, but at least the last quarter of this one hit nicely when I revisited it a few weeks back, walking under the overgrow trees of the Commonwealth Mall on an idyllic mid-summer late afternoon.
Haunted Jukebox Mix #6: Feels Like Summer (2003)
Haunted Jukebox 