Good Morning Friends! I have managed to make it to another week and with it comes a new mix. For those who might be new to the blog, each Monday I present my readers with a collection of tracks that I assemble into a Mixtape. Granted physical media doesn’t exactly translate to the internet terribly well, and as a result, I serve them up to you using YouTube and Spotify. Along with this mix, I create some fake album art, some of which is more creative than others… and I have to admit today’s is sort of a low effort showing. The goal is to create an album that plays nicely from start to finish and makes you maybe a bit nostalgic about making your own mixtapes. I absolutely was a kid that made them constantly and distributed them to my friends… and now do the same with you, my readers.
Now That’s Nonsense
During the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a string of infomercials advertising a mega compilation of pop music called “Now! That’s What I Call Music”. Each album compiled a number of Billboard top 200 chart songs, into a vessel of pure poppy nonsense. However, I am coming to find out that apparently, this series got its start over in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Most of the music I listen to on a regular basis likely never actually got any radio airplay other than alternative and college rock stations. However every so often there is a slice of the pop pie that interests me. This morning I assembled my own “Now” album made up of a lot of alternative adjacent songs that got significant radio play and in many cases appeared on a wide number of movie soundtracks. Basically, this is an album that proves I still regularly dip my toes into the top 40 pond from time to time.
Track List
Radioactive – Imagine Dragons
Pompeii – Bastille
Chandelier – Sia
Wake Me Up – Avicii
Can’t Hold Us – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis feat. Ray Dalton
Tightrope – Janelle Monae feat. Big Boi
Sail – AwolNation
I Love It – Dylan Summer
Royals – Lorde
Titanium – David Guetta feat. Sia
We Are Young – Fun feat. Janelle Monae
Pumped Up Kicks – Foster the People
Viva La Vida – Coldplay
Counting Stars – OneRepublic
The Fox – Ylvis
Listen On Spotify
Listen On Youtube
With that, we bring the seventeenth Mixtape in the series to a close. I am going to be honest, this entire process started because I really like Sail, Chandelier, and Radioactive and wanted to create a pop-themed mix around those songs. The result ended up with me digging out a large number of those guilty pleasure tracks and compiling them into something that is extremely easy to listen through. If you are brand new to this feature and want to catch up on some of my other mixes, you can check out the archive below.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. It is another Monday and as a result, it is time to bring you another Mix. For those who are new to the blog, this is a series I have been doing every Monday for the last couple of months, where I present a brand new Mixtape for your listening pleasure. As a kid, I made an awful lot of mixtapes because a good chunk of that time was in the “pre-cd hard to listen to a single track” era. The goal was to create something that was a “listen-through” or an album that I could just push play and ignore until I needed to flip it over. Granted a fair number of these tapes were designed as a way of sharing my own musical tastes with friends, but now I am sharing them with you, my readers.
Remember the Eclipse
This mix is one that I have been sitting on for a while because it has a problem, and I have not been able to remedy it. So in crafting these mixes, I have tried to apply a series of rules to them, one of them has been that no single album could have the same band twice. I have skirted this a few times by including side projects that include members of the bands already on the list, but I have attempted my best to stay true to this logic. Remember the Eclipse however has a glaring flaw in the inclusion of two different songs by The Bravery. I did not realize this flaw until I had already listened to the album several times and realized it had the ideal flow. I have been sitting on it ever since because I could not seem to figure out how to perform surgery on the playlist and strategically replace that one piece because in some ways it seemed like the ideal thing for the ideal location. So instead I am releasing this one as is, knowing that it violates my own tenets… and going to be okay with that. The name comes from a coffee house that used to exist… and for some reason popped into my head while creating this.
Track List
An Honest Mistake – The Bravery
Time to Pretend – MGMT
Believe – The Bravery
Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Someday – The Strokes
Satellite – Guster
Feel It Still – Portugal, the Man
Crooked Teeth – Death Cab for Cutie
Back in Your Head – Tegan and Sara
11th Dimension – Julian Casablancas
The Way We Get By – Spoon
Tongue Tied – Grouplove
All These Things That I’ve Done – The Killers
Listen On Spotify
Listen on YouTube
There we have it friends, the sixteenth Mixtape in this series. It began with the song An Honest Mistake by The Bravery… and in the end, I guess that is fitting given that I committed my own honest mistake in creating the list. If you find yourself wanting to catch up on the other fifteen mixes in the series, check out the archive link below.
Good Morning Friends! It is time for yet another mix to land on yet another Monday. For those who don’t know this series, each Monday I release a new MixTape that is available in both Spotify and YouTube flavors. The idea behind it is that as a kid I was a creator of many mixtapes. I would share them with my friends and often times put a lot of thought and effort into placing songs in just the right order. My goal was trying to create something that was a “listen-through” or an album that you just put in the stereo and let play. Creating an album that could be played start to end had greater significance given that rapidly skipping tracks was just not a thing that was viable. Since I don’t make physical mixtapes anymore, I make them digitally and share them with you, my readers.
Major Party Foul Dude
This album is the soundtrack to a High School or College party that I can visualize in my head summoned from the bowels of my memory. Granted a number of these songs did not exist during my college timeframe, but there is an unmistakable brand of pop-punk that fueled similar events. In my mind’s eye, I can picture a sea of red solo cups, and maybe even a trashcan full of “cowboy Koolaid” with this playing in the background. Essentially I crafted this album out of the late 90s and early 2000s post-punk music that fueled the Warp Tour and Jackass. Granted I am placing this in a very specific time context, but I feel like this sort of music is ultimately timeless. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while because I had cranked out two albums that both included some Blink 182 on them. However that was six weeks ago, and I think plenty of time has passed in order for this to feel fresh again.
Track List
Swing, Swing – The All-American Rejects
Flagpole Sitta – Harvey Danger
Fat Lip – Sum 41
Over My Head – Lit
The Rock Show – Blink-182
The Anthem – Good Charlotte
The Middle – Jimmy Eat World
Basket Case – Green Day
Ocean Avenue – Yellowcard
Nothing Inside – Machine Gun Kelly
And I – Box Car Racer
Santa Monica – Everclear
Banditos – The Refreshments
Coolidge – Descendents
King of Wishful Thinking – New Found Glory
Listen on Spotify
Listen On YouTube
There we have it friends, the fifteenth Mixtape in this series. I still have a large number of these waiting in the wings and still, find myself every few weeks going through a period of cranking out three or four of them at a time. For now, the inspiration is holding steady, so I am wondering exactly how long I can keep this going. I do realize that if I am going to keep this series going, I will need to start consuming brand new music. If this is your first mix, then I suggest checking out the archive where I keep a list of all of the past albums.
Good Morning Friends! It is time for another Mixtape Monday, and I am going to take a moment to sorta slide into this discussion. It is Blaugust and we are supposed to be giving some sage advice or some such as mentors. This friend is what you would call a series and it gives me some structure when it comes to planning around my blog. I know that in theory every Monday, which is one of the harder days to be motivated and post something is taken up by a fixed construct that I can count on. This also gives me the ability to plan ahead, knowing that each Monday I am going to need a Mixtape to write about. As such I tend to have these super productive days when I crank out a half dozen or so tapes and then keep them in the bank for when I need another Monday post.
The double-edged sword of having a series is that you are more or less expected to keep it going. While you have a predictable slot in your blog schedule, it also means that you have to more or less produce on a pattern. I have been super bad at actually keeping series going throughout the course of this blog, and so many of these have been abandoned by the wayside. For example, probably no one actually remembers Easing Into Eorzea, Media Consumption, Steampowered Sunday, or Storytime Saturdays but they were absolutely series that I attempted to make a thing and now looking back had a shocking number of posts under each of them. They are failed series because I didn’t plan ahead enough or work on trying to create a backlog of content to post under each of those categories. Essentially my advice to you is if you plan on doing a series, treat it as something that you are going to create content for ahead of time so that you can meet those weekly drops.
Aether Consumed Prayers Answered
It is shocking to no one who has read this blog for more than a few posts recently that I am back playing an awful lot of Final Fantasy XIV. The game itself is great, but one of the things that have always stood out is the music. I realize there are a number of you that do not listen to in-game soundtracks, and I would say at least for Final Fantasy XIV it is a critical flaw in your logic. This game spends so much effort devoted to making sure that the music is great and synchronizes down to the frame with animates. One of the places this is most clearly evidenced is the Primal fights and something like Titan for Leviathan would not be the same experience without the soundtrack and the changes that are made during the source of the fight. This morning I share with you some of my favorite big fight tracks, while not all are from Primal encounters they represent the vast majority. Unfortunately this means that the YouTube version of this playlist is going to be super spoilery and I will give it a very special warning below.
Track List
Fallen Angel – Masayoshi Soken
Spiral – Masayoshi Soken
Rise – Masayoshi Soken
Battle on the Big Bridge – Nobuo Uematsu
Amatsu Kaze – Masayoshi Soken
Unbreakable (Duality) – Masayoshi Soken
Under the Weight – Masayoshi Soken
Through the Maelstrom – Masayoshi Soken
Metal – Brute Justice Mode – Masayoshi Soken
Oblivion – Masayoshi Soken
Birds of Prey – Masayoshi Soken
Wayward Daughter – Masayoshi Soken
Unbending Steel – Masayoshi Soken
Listen On Spotify
Listen On YouTube
Normally I embed the YouTube Playlist here, but I feel like I need to give some very special warning with this one. Unlike is normally the case, the vast majority of these videos are actually fighting spoilers and show players fighting along to the primal encounter itself. This means watching the videos could spoil not only fight mechanics but significant story beats. Please watch at your own peril and I realize this is frustrating given that up until this point I have tried to give both Spotify and YouTube equal treatment. So I will link to the playlist, but if you have not experienced these fights then I highly suggest minimizing it and letting it play in the background without actually watching the fights themselves.
Well folks that were the Fourteenth mixtape in this series, and as a result, it is clearly aligned to being music from Final Fantasy XIV. I am going, to be honest, this is entirely a happy synergy that I did not plan in the least. I have been playing a lot of the games and loving the music, and this sorta happened spontaneously. Again if you are not listening to the music while you play this game, you really should remedy that. As always if you are so inclined, you can listen to the entire Mixtape Mondays Archive:
