Last Laughs For The Madcap

I don’t idolize Rock Stars, or get caught up in nostalgia trips for music made before I was old enough to read, but there was something uniquely cool and tragic about Syd Barrett, and his recent death touched me. I wrote elsewhere that it was a weird combination of pathos and bathos — the inevitable conclusion of a sad story that most of us had forgotten was still going on.

Stunned

Cloud Sculpture

Knight Of Cups

Fanciful — Temperamental — Introspective

Seven Of Wands

Aggression — Defiance — Conviction

80–82

This is a shameless personal exercise in nostalgia — remembering the way I discovered new wave and punk-rock music in the time from the summer of 1980 (when I first started listening to Top 40 and rock radio) through the summer of 1982 (just before I left home for college.) These are the songs that had the greatest impact on me at the time, not necessarily the ones that I consider the “best” or “most significant”.

Sky, Blow Away

_“Betty said she prayed today that the sky would blow away; or maybe stay, she wasn’t sure.” _ —Nick Drake

1,000 Dreams

This mix accreted itself around the song “To Whom Can I Tell My Pains”, which I discovered while randomly surfing through the iTunes Music Store, and which reduced me to tears on the first listen. As a setting for it I pulled together other songs with the right levels of sadness, distance, exoticness or thrilling dissonance. This also gave me a chance to attempt something I’d wanted to do for a while: add “serious” 20th-century classical music to a mix.

Dust On Her Hands From The Sky

I threw together this mix in one evening as an introduction to “shoegazer” (aka “dreampop”) music, inspired by some guy who posted that he’d just discovered My Bloody Valentine and wanted to know what else sounded like it. I uploaded the mix the next day. He never responded with thanks, or even posted anything in that forum again, so I have no idea whether he liked it. So what! I like it plenty.

The Dragons Of Blueland

jgd3 and I put this together collaboratively over a few weeks. I picked out the first two tracks, and after that we mostly took turns, emailing each other the next track.