It has been well over a year since we did a music playlist on this site. At some point late in my wife's second pregnancy, I stopped listening to new music and started buying a lot of older records (remember the vinyl womb torture?). I had an amazing encounter with Jim Shaw at a record store in Hamtramck, where I followed him around as he pulled records out of the stacks and practically ordered me to buy them. From my casual mention of Sweetheart of the Rodeo he shared his vast knowledge of obscure roots music to help some guy that just wandered in off the street obtain a dozen records he would thoroughly enjoy and would lead to dozens more. Later, after Jim was stricken with a particularly ruthless cancer, I would read about how he had done this for countless others, especially musicians (including the Gories). Say what you want about the elitism of record stores: even with the glut of music available online, record stores are still places where records that should not be forgotten are placed directly in the hands of someone who will keep them turning.

So Jim Shaw handed me my cherished original issue of Jim Ford's Harlan County, Porter Wagoner's wonderfully insane What Ain't to be Just Might Happen, and Gene Clark's Echoes. And Matt at Underground Sounds handed me the reissued Death album, raving about it well before the New York Times ever did. And Brad at Peoples Records shares his amazing knowledge of Detroit music with anyone who walks into his new Woodward Ave. store. And there are also folks like the guys at The Rising Storm sharing their amazing record collections online. No one's musical taste evolves in a vacuum and I feel so thankful that there are people with such an amazing knowledge of old music sharing it instead of hoarding it.

For this mix, I wanted to share with you some of these cool older albums (in this case generally recorded between 1969 and 1972) that others have helped me discover. I don't have the ability to rip vinyl right now, so I chose songs that are generally available online elsewhere. Luckily they're still really good ones:

[streaming playlist]

1. Jim Ford: I'm Gonna Make Her Love Me, from Harlan County (1969)
2. Death: Keep on Knocking, from . . .For the Whole World To See (1974)
3. Diana Ross and the Supremes: Not Fade Away, unreleased (1964 cover of Buddy Holly song, based on the Rolling Stones' version)
4. Lonnie Mack: Asphalt Outlaw Hero, from The Hills of Indiana (1971) (I have many hundreds of trucker songs, but this is the only one that sounds like it was recorded for Motown).
5. Link Wray: Fire and Brimstone, from Wray's Three Track Shack (1971)
6. Gene Clark: Elevator Operator, from Echoes (1967) (there's this little chair in a 1920s elevator we frequent, and I laugh about this song every time we see it).
7. Paul & Linda McCartney: In the Heart of the Country, from Ram (1971)
8. Bob Martin: 3 Mill Town, from Midwest Farm Disaster (1972) (I don't have the vinyl for this amazing album (introduced by Jason@Risingstorm) but I was able to get the CD. Martin went on to become a high school economics teacher!)
9. Loudon Wainwright III: Motel Blues, from A Live One (1979) (I know he sings that douchey wedding song about daughters in the water, but I like this version way better than Alex Chilton's (which I heard first)).
10. Ernie Graham: So Lonely, from Ernie Graham (1971)
11. Karen Dalton: Something On Your Mind, from In My Own Time (1971) (I can't remember where I first heard Karen Dalton, but anyone who enjoys Joanna Newsom or Gillian Welch might be amazed by some of the songs Dalton recorded in the early 1970s)
12. Kim Fowley: Something New, from International Heroes (1973)
13. John Prine: Souvenirs, from Diamonds in the Rough (1972)
14. Bobby Charles: Small Town Talk, from Bobby Charles (1972)
15. Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson: My Rifle, Pony and Me from Rio Bravo Soundtrack (1959) (Okay, I know this doesn't really fit with the rest, but the Rio Bravo soundtrack was one of the records I was looking for when this whole thing started. I wanted to get a version of this song (one of my daughter's favorite lullabies) without the rascally old man in it. This song (and his performance in the movie) totally made me rethink Dean Martin and look up some great old songs by Ricky Nelson)
16. Porter Wagoner: Rubber Room, from What Ain't to be Just Might Happen (1972) (Jim Shaw's eyes widened when I told him I'd never heard this song. It is amazing. The lyrics are one thing, but consider also the reverb and echo effects. My daughter thinks this is a song about a bouncy castle)
17. Son Volt: Gramophone (live, 2005)

* * * * *

So, finding out about new music (or even old music) takes work (and help). We've got one last Sandisk Slot Radio player to give out (a $100 value). Sandisk is an advertiser on this site, and the little devices they're advertising are designed to take some of the work out of discovering new (and old) music. They come with 1000 preloaded songs and additional cards organized by genre can be purchased for $4o or so. Note: the playlist I created above is not affiliated with Sandisk or necessarily representative of any of the artists you will find on the SlotRadio.

We've had such an overwhelming response to these giveaways that I'm going to try to make this one a little bit harder to better the odds of those who participate. To enter the random drawing, tell us about some way you were exposed to new music that had a profound effect on you. It could be an old girlfriend, her cool older brother, a record store, a website, or a concert you just stumbled across. Anything. Or you could just say something about any of the songs I've posted above.

The contest ends at 3:00 p.m. EST on August 14, 2009. Good luck.

For the last few years I've written about ten albums that I enjoyed during the previous year, and I've always received a nice response from people who wanted new music. This has never been intended as a true "best of" or "top ten" list (given how little music I get to listen to these days, I could never make such a claim). These are just the new records I found myself listening to and enjoying the most over the last twelve months. I've had this damn post written since before the new year, but with my debilitating hangover, a frustrating site re-design, and the technical issues involved with making a playlist of songs from these albums available to everyone, it's taken me until now to publish it.

Here is the streaming playlist. I tried to choose good songs that were also available for free downloading if you decide you like them.

Okkervil River: Stage Names (JagJaguwar)
Song: Unless It's Kicks

I probably listened to this album more than any other in 2007. The kid loves it, particularly the song with the xylophone, which I now hate because of the thousands of times she's asked to hear it. Kids are the new frat boys who show up to see your favorite band and sing along with all the best songs. They ruin everything.

Shearwater: Palo Santo (Expanded Edition) (Matador)
Song: Red Sea Black Sea

This is kind of cheating (the original release came out back in 2006, but I didn't hear it until Matador released the expanded edition in 2007). But this Sheff-less record is epic and so beautiful.

Menomena: Friend or Foe (Barsuk)
Song: Wet and Rusting

Feist: The Reminder (Interscope)
Song: I Feel it All

This album was like Dancing With the Stars at our house, man. Everyone could agree about it, from Grandma on down. Plus, Leslie Feist is the best excuse ever to completely forget about Chan Marshall and all her fucking antics.

Bishop Allen: The Broken String (Dead Oceans)
Song: Click Click Click Click

My favorite song on the album is actually The Chinatown Bus, but the camera song was a free download at their site. The first time I heard this song on my illegal advance copy I wondered how long it would be before I heard it in a camera commercial. Not long.

Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)
Song: Don't You Evah

Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)
Song: Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse (also one of the greatest videos of the year).

So this is the band that made that "Let's Go Outback Tonight" song, yeah, and then they made another incredibly beautiful non-commercial record and wrote the most life-affirming rant about selling out ever. Reading it always warms my federated heart. An excerpt:

"The pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the 70's created an impossible code in which no one can actually live by. It's such garbage. The idea that anyone who attempts to do anything commercial is a sell out is completely out of touch with reality. The punk rock manifesto is one of anarchy and intolerance. The punk rockers polluted our minds. They offered a solution that had no future. . .Now we have all of these half-conceived ideas and idiot philosophies floating around to confuse and alienate us. I think it is important to face reality. It is important to decide whether you are going to completely rail against the system or find a way to make it work for you. You cannot do both -- and if you attempt to do both you will only become even more bitter and confused."

New Ruins: Sounds They Make (Parasol)
Song: I'll Sleep in Your House

White Rabbits: Fort Nightly (Say Hey)
Song: While We Go Dancing

Rogue Wave: Asleep At Heaven's Gate (Brushfire)
Song: Lake Michigan

Christ, I guess 2007 was the year every song I liked turned up in a television commercial. Oh well. I'm off to grab a bloomin' onion.

I'm convinced that cities -- downtowns especially -- are the hottest places to be in the summer. All the pavement, cars, buses and air conditioning exhaust coming out of tall buildings add at least ten degrees onto the high temperature of the day. Dutch tells me that yesterday Juniper walked out the front door wearing nothing but the sandals she'd put on her feet herself. Dutch grabbed his shoes as quickly as he could, and followed her down the sidewalk. Maybe other toddlers do stuff like this all the time, but in general, our kid is cautious and reluctant to be out of our sight. But not on this day. She walked several blocks down the sidewalk, emboldened by her nudity, I guess, so fast that Dutch had to run a little to catch her. When he finally reached her, he asked her where she was going. "To work," she said. When asked what her job was, she said, "To take good care of Dada."

So far, I haven't resorted to walking to work naked to deal with the heat in this city. Instead, I listen to music to take my mind off the sweat that's trickling down the back of my knees. I'd like to say that I created this new mix of music for you by carefully considering the perfect transition from one song to another, but really, I just lifted them from among the "most played" songs on my iPod.

I'm sure some better streaming player has come along since the last time we did one of these mixes, but since Dutch spent an hour and a half last night swearing trying to get this just right (time that could have been spent looking for a much easier solution), we're just going to stick with this one. Some of the links below go to free and legal mp3 downloads.

To listen to the mix, just click here

1. Bowerbirds- Olive Hearts
2. Bishop Allen- Rain
3. Heartless Bastards- All This Time
4. Broken West- Baby on my Arm
5. Andrew Bird- Plasticities
6. Pas/Cal- Poor Maude
7. The Lucksmiths- The Music Next Door
8. Jarvis Cocker- Heavy Weather
9. Luna- Bonnie and Clyde
10. Yo La Tengo - Little Eyes
11. Shelby Sifers- Snowman
12. Two Gallants- All Your Faithless Loyalties
13. Spoon- Black Like Me
14. Piano Magic - I Came To Your Party Dressed as a Shadow

I don't have comments about why I like each song, but I will say that the first couple bars of #2 cause Juniper to instantly start her "rock-and-roll" dance, which involves shaking her head side-to-side while running in place, a dance I assume she learned from her father. When she hears #9 , Juniper imitates the "ah-ah-ooh" background noise EVERY FREAKING TIME. Dutch saw Yo La Tengo at the Detroit CityFest last weekend and he said they were amazing (and free) but I stayed home with the baby so I don't know if they played #10. And you really need to buy the new Spoon record, and #13 should be all it takes to convince you.

I have a confession. Although I have complained about kids' music time and time again, even comparing most of it to, "a secret U.S. Army acoustic weapons system designed to paralyze and induce vomiting by all exposed to it," I do have this cassette tape that Juniper's old day care gave us to listen to at home so she would be familiar with the music at the weekly singalong. And I have been playing it in the car lately. A lot. At first I treated it like one of those little hammers in the "break only in case of emergency" boxes. But only an emergency turned into "only when she's screaming" which then turned into "only when she asks for that goddamn Dancing with Teddy song" which then turned into the tape being the default audio experience in our 4-door sedan. Wood and I went out for dinner without Juniper on Saturday night and we drove two miles before we realized we were still listening to that fucking tape. And we were fucking humming along with it.

But that's not the worst of it. Yesterday was an unusually warm and pleasant November day, and Juniper and I were driving with the windows halfway down on Detroit's east side. At a stoplight two young black dudes rolled to a slow stop next to me, their chrome-plated rims shaped to look like the barrel of a revolver were spinning long after their car had ceased forward motion, and from the trunk of their car two enormous speakers were blasting a bass-heavy rap song, the only lyrics of which seemed to be, "Scared motherfucker? Then call the police. . .Scared motherfucker? Then call the police." This, by itself, did not bother me. In high school I had driven a friend to "a fat girl's house" so he could "get some pussy" in my 1990 Pontiac Grand Prix with the one gray fender and he put an MC Breed cassette in my Kenwood deck, but the only lyric on the whole album seemed to be, "it's just another nigga to my AK. . .it's just another nigga to my AK." That made me uncomfortable. These guys turned to look at me through their backseat passenger window and I nodded, feeling pretty out-macho'd just by virtue of their ride. Then the driver of the car leaned forward and turned his stereo' volume down, and all you could hear was the music coming from my car stereo at an unexpectedly high volume:

Everyone jump-n-jump-n-Josie,
Everyone jump-n-jump-n-Josie,
Everyone jump-n-jump-n-Josie
Jumpin' all day long!

I would have reached for the volume knob myself, but that would have sent Juniper into a whiny chorus of "more Jumpin-n-Josie? more Jumpin-n-Josie?" So I just shrugged my shoulders, and before I could offer them some of our pruno, their stereo was blasting even louder than before and the light had turned green, and they were squealing their tires to get away from us. Now who's scared, motherfuckers?

The protean Austinite Paige McGuire (formerly of Miss Domestic fame) has specifically requested that we enter her "Shitty Mixtape Challenge." What is this "Shitty Mix Tape Challenge?" you ask. Well, I'm not quite sure. Paige is way too cool for stuff like "rules." She links to this video, and assumes we can figure it out for ourselves. She's kind of like that guy Jesus talked about who taught the other guy to fish rather than just give him fish, you know, right? Basically, the mix just has to be really, really bad, and embarrassing to play from a gigantic radio raheem boombox while walking around an anonymous urban environment. We here at Sweet Juniper love rules so we have created several additional ones to those Siobhan imposed upon herself for her excellent entry:

1. All songs must currently exist on one of my hard drives.
2. All songs must either (1) have been represented in Wood's cassette collection that I perused upon my first visit to her ancestral home in April, 1996; or (2) must have been in the catalog of the deejays who did our wedding.
3. No Eddie Money.

You can listen to our shitty mixtape entry here (but I don't know why you'd want to):

1. Eddie Murphy & Michael Jackson: whazupwitu?

Something tells me that this song could potentially have been the source of the funniest of all the "Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories" in a parallel universe where Dave Chapelle didn't go crazy. This song is proof of the limits of Eddie Murphy's talent that came long before Daddy Daycare.




2. The West Coast Rap All Stars: We're All in the Same Gang

If you had a Delorean with an operating flux capacitor, wouldn't it be nice to go back and tell the Traveling Wilburys that it's a nice idea when you're all stoned at Neil Young's birthday party, but please, don't make that album. Or the other one. Same thing with all those people in "We Are the World." But imagine if you could have put a stop to this monstrosity: Tone-Loc, Above The Law, Ice-T, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, J.J. Fad, Young MC, Digital Underground, Oaktown's 3.5.7, MC Hammer, Eazy-E, King Tee, Body & Soul, Def Jef, and Michel'le all rap on this "positive" 1990 single recorded purportedly to combat gang violence in LA several years before several of its featured stars made millions as "gangsta" rappers. It's so bad the earwax oozes out of my ears into my brain just to get away from it.

3. PM Dawn: I'd Die Without You

If I ever tried out for American Idol, this is the song I would sing. And I would totally sing it to Randy.





4. Paula Abdul (duet with "The Wild Pair"): Opposites Attract

I owned the cassette single to this, and used to listen to it while mowing the lawn. I didn't buy MC Skat Kat's solo album though.





5. Jermaine Stewart: We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off

This song reminds me of all those pamphlets that the Mormon chick I took to prom used to show me.

I recently found and listened to an old TDK D60 in a junk box marked only by the faded word "jams." Is there a word for the experience of hearing music and having it transport you to an earlier time in your life? There should be.

This tape had known the interior of the Kenwood cassette player that rested in the dashboard of my trusty old red 1990 Pontiac Grand Prix with the one gray fender. The Kenwood cassette player was wired to the generic 250-Watt amp that underpowered two 12 inch Rockford Fosgate speakers in a box that I bought off a kid who needed money real bad to pay some other kid back. I kept the box chained up in the trunk of the car with 6 inches of upholstery between the car's interior and the speakers; it didn't matter, I have never been an audiophile. I just bought them to make the entire car rattle with bass. My parents swore they could tell whether I was going to make my curfew several minutes before I pulled in the driveway.

In 1994 I was friends with a guy who had me drive him to the mall so he could buy some "gear" at this store called "The Man Alive" that sold duochromatic outfits by the likes of Karl Kani: big baggie green and yellow shorts and an oversized shirt with matching green and yellow panels. He once stole me a pair of orange denim Girbauds with the tag suggestively on the crotch. He claimed to have lost his virginity at the age of eleven, two full years before I stopped playing with action figures. I would end up spending a lot of time in high school waiting around the living rooms of doublewide trailers watching television and eating no-bake cookies with the younger sisters of the girls he was fucking. Then we would pick up this guy called Lip and play basketball. They called him Lip because his lower lip was so big when he fell asleep on the way to Cedar Point one time my friends managed to put four full potato chips side-by-side on said lip while he snored. Lip had at least fourteen brothers and sisters and he was always beating the shit out of them. Lip's in prison now, and the other guy pays three different baby mamas every month.

God that mix brought back memories of awesomeness. I downloaded all the songs and now present them to you in close to their original order. Try to imagine, if you will, driving home from Lake Michigan in a rattling car smelling like sunburn and sand after an unsuccessful afternoon picking up girls from other school districts and listening to these songs in 1994:

1. A Tribe Called Quest: excursions
2. Beastie Boys: flute loop
3. Rakim: guess who's back
4. De la Soul: ego trippin (gumbo funk remix)
5. The Coup: fat cats, bigga fish/
6. The Coup: pimps

This wasn't actually on the original mix, but they really need to be presented together. When I heard it again recently I was like, whoa, I totally know people who talk like that now.

7. Notorious B.I.G.: juicy

"Super nintendo, Sega Genesis/ When I was dead broke man I couldn't picture this." There was this kid in my art class who the principal let perform "positive" raps on the P.A. in the morning about doing your homework and not doing drugs, then in art class when the teacher wasn't paying attention he'd rap about selling drugs and that kind of shit. I never saw him without a pick in his fro. He used to sing those two lines from this song over and over and over.

8. Funkdoobiest: Bow wow wow.
9. Beastie Boys (w/Cypress Hill): So What'cha Want (remix)
10. Del tha Funkee Homosapien: Ya Lil' Crumbsnatchers
11. The Fugees: nappy heads (remix)
12. Digable Planets: 9th wonder
13. De La Soul (featuring of teenage fanclub): fallin'

If I could go back and re-choose the de la soul songs I would pick something from their second album. I remember thinking this song was hilarious though because of the Tom Petty sample. It comes from the soundtrack of the 1993 movie Judgment Night, about a group of privileged minorities (including Cuba Gooding Jr. and Emilio Estevez) whose RV breaks down in an underprivileged white neighborhood run by Denis Leary, Piven, and the bald guy from House of Pain who named himself after boxer shorts, released an album of boring acoustic music and then had a heart attack. The thematic premise of the soundtrack was to match up "alternative" rock groups with rappers to create pre-Linkin Park raprock monstrosities like the song with Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill, who to my knowledge have never managed to record a song that wasn't about marijuana. I think Pearl Jam were like totally scared for their lives when they recorded it, but I'll bet Sonic Youth was totally into it.

14. Wu-Tang Clan: Da Mystery of Chessboxing
15. Beastie Boys: Car Thief

This is the best Beastie Boys song ever. I have no arguments with 1994 Dutch on this one.

16. The Pharcyde (with the Brand New Heavies): Soulflower

[this mix is missing two songs I couldn't find online: one by the Alkoholiks and one by the Beanuts I think]

Note: most of these songs are not appropriate for kids, unless you are awesome.