Schmutzie's November 2018 Mixtape
This month’s mixtape is 1 hour and 28 minutes long and has 21 jazz, alternative, rock, pop, folk, R&B/soul, and classical songs from 5 different decades.
November 2018’s mixtape track listing on Spotify and Apple Music:
1. Sinnerman — Nina Simone (1965) 2. Woman (feat. Lana Del Rey) — Cat Power (2018) 3. Hotel Delmano — MUNYA (2018) 4. Mariners Apartment Complex — Lana Del Rey (2018) 5. How Did This Happen?! — Bodega (2018) 6. Diet Gum — John Grant (2018) 7. Beat City — The Raveonettes (2002) 8. The American Ruse — MC5 (1970) 9. Teenage Kicks — The Undertones (1978) 10. Girl U Want — Devo (1980) 11. Old Old Fashioned — Frightened Rabbit (2008) 12. God Lifts Up the Lowly — Ezra Furman (2018) 13. The Glory Goes — Will Oldham (2018) 14. Love You — The Free Design (1970) 15. 10 miles — Adrianne Lenker (2018) 16. Hello In There — John Prine (1971) 17. Black Chair — Twain (2017) 18. Dolores & Kimberly — Advance Base (2018) 19. Couldn’t Get It Right — Climax Blues Band (1976) 20. River — Leon Bridges (2015) 21. Mehcinut — Jeremy Dutcher (2018)
Some notes:
This month’s playlist is good. I know, I know. Of course, I think this. But it is. It’s good.
When I started doing these playlists late in 2017, I hadn’t been listening to music much. I listened to albums I already had and cycled through my usual rotation for a long time, but I was depressed, and doing the same thing over and over seemed like a giant yellow highlighter over what essentially spelled out this: DOING THE SAME THING UNTIL YOU DIE WILL KILL YOU. So I picked up a few music podcasts, started picking through stuff on Apple Music and Spotify, downloaded Shazam, and made lists of songs I heard on movies and Netflix and from DJs in restaurants. I wasn’t really into it for months, but I treated it like brain vitamins I had to take every day, and now I thrive on it.
When I welcomed music into my life, I started to notice it all over the place, like a face you suddenly see everywhere once you notice a particular person. It comes at you through other people’s apartment doors, down alleys from people parked in cars, out of hidden waiting room speakers while you thumb through two-year-old magazines, and in the middle of movie scenes that hook you deep.
I want you to pay particular attention to the last track, Jeremy Dutcher’s “Mehcinut” from his 2018 Polaris Music Prize-winning album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. “Mehcinut” is a death chant from Dutcher’s Wolastoq First Nation, and he includes part of an original wax cylinder recording of the song from the early 1900s near its end, drawing a thread from his voice to theirs, a calling back and forth across a century, a binding loop.
Put your head between two speakers of good quality and turn it up.
I’m taking part in National Blog Posting Month, which means I’m posting on this blog every day throughout November. You can follow along and see who else is posting this month by following these hashtags on Twitter: #NetPositiveBlog and #NaBloPoMo.
