April Mixtape

For the first monthly mixtape for the blog I've pulled largely from the top. This playlist consists of a lot of new-to-me tracks that I've recently found and liked. As I've written about before, I think it's important to keep finding and incorporating new music, and this playlist is a little bit of that for me.

What's the inspiration here?

Well, obviously the many hours spent at the family computer as a teen agonizing about which tracks went on the burned CD. I miss that - it was a type of love language I'd like to indulge in more here going forward.

It's also a product of the fun we had making a mixtape for our wedding guests this summer. That mixtape served both as the place card for guests at dinner (each one had their name on it) and as a party favor. The prompt for it's contents was atypical love songs - Macy got one side and I got the other. Building it really reminded me how much fun it is to put music into a physical package, being selective with my song choices, and thinking about how everything mixes together.

So we're starting a series here - it will be roughly monthly (but I reserve the right to drop whenever and however often I want).

This being the first of this set also means that this isn't how they're going to look in a few months. This one will not immediately become a single physical mix - with our recent move we're not quite set up in the garage to get that done. Once we have the tape recorder and the hifi system set up in the garage I'll be making actual physical cassettes.

The goal with these is to make something much more physical I can put on a my wall and consume myself or occasionally share with friends. I've always been fascinated by the DIY inserts of cassettes and loved the art of the burned CD, the demo cassette, the mix you make for your friend.

But that's all a lot about not this playlist and what's on it!

The April mix Look Around. There's Beauty Here (Spotify and Apple) is one I'm not sure is supposed to be played loudly - I haven't been. For me it feels right when I put on the headphones and take a long morning walk with a coffee. And because the world would be a little more grey and boring if contradictions didn't exist and we didn't point them out, I also think this would work really well for your second glass of wine hosting friends.