Laura and Jeff started up the really cool idea of a mix-tape club. Each month we come up with a set of themes and choose songs to match them. For example: a song about transportation or a song about work or a song by a one-hit wonder. Then we mail out CDs to everyone in the club. Our most recent installment was a collection of “summer songs” – not necessarily about summer but songs that somehow invoke a summery feel. Here were my picks:
1. El Guincho – Palmitos Park
“Bajando de la montaña en seguida me puse a cantar una canción sin motivo”
2. Weezer – Surf Wax America
“I'm goin' surfin' cuz I don't like your face.”
3. Loudon Wainwright III – The Swimming Song
“At the latter I was informal, at the former I wore my suit – I wore my swimming suit.”
4. Nelly – Ride With Me
As a freshman on my high school crew team, I vividly remember the varsity men playing this song on loop from a boombox during a Miami regatta – an experience I also associate with inescapable, sweltering summer heat.
5. North Mississippi Allstars – Meet Me In the City
I just discovered that this track is actually a cover of a song by blues legend Junior Kimbrough about whom I know nothing. Can anyone recommend any other songs?
6. The Doobie Brothers – What a Fool Believes
7. Electric Light Orchestra – Mr. Blue Sky
A fair-weather homage to “A Day in the Life” and other great Beatles songs.
8. The Smiths – Cemetry Gates
“A dreaded sunny day, so let’s go where we’re happy and I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates”
9. The Allman Bros. Band – Southbound
Any summer mix is not complete without a few good driving songs fit for rolling down the windows and cranking the jams. For me, The Allman Bros. are a tried and true classic to suit that need.
10. Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys – New Mule Skinner Blues
Summer also wouldn’t be complete without some bluegrass. According to history Bill Monroe virtually invented the style so they named it after his band.
11. John Prine and Bonnie Raitt – Angel from Montgomery
Just like “California Stars,” this song has a deep sentimental value for me. Another camp favorite, this song was usually sung in the evening by the old barn just as the fireflies were starting to appear. Hearing it again instantly makes me homesick for what is one of favorite places on earth – the little enclave in the rolling hills of West Virginia where I spent most of my summers.
12. Belle & Sebastian – I’m A Cuckoo
Rhyming “Tokyo” with “Thin Lizzy-O” is only forgivable since it is followed by the genius pairing of “cuckoo” and “Harajuku.”
13. Traveling Wilburys – Margarita
If this song were in a crossword, the clue might be: “A Dylan, Petty, et al, summer beverage recommendation?”
14. The Emotions – Best of my Love
Another feel-good classic to suit the season
15. Incubus – Summer Romance (Anti-Gravity Love Song)
In college we once strung a tin-can phone across the quad. Needless to say it didn’t actually work but it was still fun trying.
16. Coolio – Fantastic Voyage
“Slide, slide, slippity-slide” – a song about escapism.
17. Jamiroquoi – Seven Days in Sunny June
Pretty self-explanatory I think
18. Gui Boratto – Beautiful Life
Bonus Track: Soft Tigers (Waxmasters remix) – Ice Cream
Ok, I apologize in advance for including this sonic atrocity, but I thought it was pretty hilarious at least the first time around.
2 comments:
Yay for the tin can phone! Fun times! And I still say that if those Reunions workers hadn't cut our line, we could have made improvements on our prototype and gotten that thing working. Version 2.0 was slimmer, faster, and more ergonomic, with a polymer-coated string and top-end, gourmet soup headpieces. Oh, the possibilities....
Interesting to know.
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