Tomorrow is Friday and it will be time once again to go out into that gray city of ours and get drunk around a bunch of horrific strangers. It’s expensive and inevitable and it is your duty as a maladjusted twenty-something. But until then, why should you needlessly punish yourself?
Sprawl out on an extravagant rug and put your headphones on. You won’t regret it —unlike the eleven beers you will force yourself to drink tomorrow night in a misguided effort to soothe your throat, raw and bloody from all the howlings and wordless lamentations of a typcial Friday night. Yeesh, your problems are dumb. Chill out, would ya?
Outta My Head – M. Ward
Silver Trees – Asura
The Rain Song – Led Zeppelin
Mermaid – Okkervil River
Moonlight Mile – The Rolling Stones
Any Major Dude – Steely Dan
Never Come Around – La Sera
Alive In ’85 – Broken Social Scene
Hurricane Black – Mos Dub (Max Tannone)
After Hours – The Velvet Underground
(You can find this playlist on the left column of the site until next Thursday. It will be permanently archived here.)
This mix contains no tracks by The Eagles. Because I know It’s been a long day and you hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.
There’s definitely a serious illness going around right now. Everyone is miserable and modern science can do little to help. It’s like the Summer of ’96 when I got mono from Samantha Grimaldi at Space Camp.
Just because you’re feeling under the weather doesn’t mean you have to stay under the covers, though. In fact, the best thing you can do is to jump up and get the blood moving. There’s a Rocky marathon on AMC this week for Chrissake! But if that isn’t enough to get you motivated, perhaps this playlist will have you movin’ and groovin’:
Dance Around the Fire – The Golden Filter
Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight – The Fireman
Heard It On the Radio – The Bird and the Bee
Switched On – Islands
Careful What You Say – Class Actress
Striking – Francis and the Lights
Barricade – Interpol
Vocal Chords – Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.
Bloody Palms – Phantogram
Don’t Let Go – Jeff Lynne
(You can find this playlist on the left column of the site until next Thursday. It will be permanently archived here.)
Hope you feel better! And don’t worry about Samantha Grimaldi, it all worked out. She ended up dating one of our Mission Specialists. He got her pregnant a few years later. They live in Plant City. I win!
Look outside. Nothing out there but searing wind, cold gray slush and irritable strangers. It’s a regular old Winter Wonderland. And until Steve Jobs completes his weather machine, we’ll have to stick it out.
But we don’t have to like it. Since you’re going to be in a crummy mood anyway, you might as well go all out. Curl up in the vast loneliness of your empty bed and pull those frozen sheets up over your head, because I made you a new playlist:
Winter Night - Scott Walker
Get Frostied - Deastro
I’m In Your Church At Night - Active Child
Snow Angels - Foxes in Fiction
Downtown - Destroyer
All Downhill From Here - Jim O’Rourke
Virtue the Cat Explains Her Departure - The Weakerthans
Candy Jail - Silver Jews
Walk Off - The National
Sleep Warm - Cornelius
(You can find this playlist on the left column of the site until next Thursday. It will be permanently archived here.)
And for real, look at the bright side. At least your Internet still works and your whole country is not on fire.
I’m not a tastemaker by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I spend most of my time nestled against the safe, smooth comfort of the backside of the curve. Nonetheless, my life has a soundtrack just as I’m sure yours does. If you came anywhere near me in 2010, there was a good chance you were going to hear tunes from these albums gently accenting our encounter.
*SPOILER ALERT* Despite a hard lobby from @iamdiddy, I did not include Last Train to Paris on this list. Read more »
Back in October I hauled out to Old Jersey for a couple of days to help my pals Mandy & Lucia shoot a video for Nicole Atkins. It just went up on vevo.com today and it’s embedded below.
Like any good wannabe Jehovah’s Witness, I’ve never been one to make a big deal about my birthday. Usually I just order a non-English speaking female escort and have a subdued Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza party for two. This year, however, is a little bit different. This year…on March 23…The Bird and the Bee are releasing Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates. That’s right, my favorite pop act of the last 10 years has recorded an album of cover songs from my favorite pop act of the last 30 years, and it drops on my birthday. My worlds haven’t collided this hard since I realized it was acceptable to have alcohol with breakfast on Sundays (you can call it “brunch” if you like, but it’s old fashioned alcoholism to me). Read more »
In honor of SXSW going down this week in Austin, I wanted to take a look back at one of the highlights from my recent trip to the city Money Magazine named #3 on their list of “2009′s Best Big Cities.” (I often pretend to read Money on the subway in an effort to more easily attract prostitutes in Lower Manhattan)
I had long heard great things about Austin, which was strange to me considering it is the capital of a state which elected George W. Bush to TWO four year terms as governor (a first in Texas history). You remember him, right? He’s the guy who proclaimed June 10, 2000 to be “Jesus Day” in Texas, and then went on to become President of the United States and was elected to another TWO terms. *sigh* What was I saying? Oh yeah, so anyway, when people were first telling me that Austin had this amazing music and arts scene, I was like: really? you mean these guys? Soon, though, I had no choice but to believe the hype, and since I knew someone who lived there, a trip was inevitable. Read more »
A little over twelve hundred years ago Charlemange was officially crowned the first Imperator of the Holy Roman Empire. Throughout his reign he established the foundation of both the French and German monarchies, united almost all of Europe and helped shape the western world as we know it. Now, you have to admit it, that’s a pretty impressive resume, but it pales in comparison to that of his direct descendent: Sir Chirstopher Lee.
In a career spanning more than 62 years, Sir Christopher Lee has played 260+ roles (most of which are villains), has recently been knighted and is a prominent figure in just about everything that has ever mattered. He was Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, Count Dooku in Star Wars, “Pistols” Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun and has played Count Dracula so many times that as far as my brain is concerned, he IS Count Dracula. Seriously, looking at his IMDB page is like looking into the Grand Canyon. So of course when the time came to tell the tale of ol’ Charles I it only made sense to cast the emperor’s most bad-ass relative for the lead. Read more »
So, Zooey Deschanel (Elf, She & Him, 500 Days Of Summer) got hitched to chart-topping indie lord, Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie) and yes, that really did happened.
Anyway, thanks to the biproducts from miracles of technology and journalism, we bring you an alleged transcript from the couple’s ceremony featuring a portion from Gibbard’s vows:
BG: There is a powerful pull that compels me to grow closer to you at every instance of our eyes meeting whether its under a crisp atmosphere of cooling air or facing the harshest of solar flares…
(Enter arpeggiated guitar part & choppy drum beat) Read more »
