WARMER MIXTAPES #1645 | by Greg Salwen [Sonoak]/(Adam & Naive, City Museum, We The Chocolate Sparrow) of The Needs
1. Broken Social Scene | Looks Just Like The Sun
Meredith was my first friend to like Cool Music and she showed me this band in 8th grade. I think this was the tipping point into part of my life where I really started to become a person. Looks Just Like The Sun is one of the best produced songs I’ve ever heard. The sound and arrangement of the little comments makes me feel like I’m right there in the recording session. I also can’t help but feel nostalgic for the zeitgeist of Teenage Passion captured on the whole album, You Forgot It In People.
2. Animal Collective | Winters Love
In 2008, my Senior Year, a kid in my High School got into a car crash during lunch and died. The next day, during English, I found myself confused to the point of crying without understanding why (I was only friendly with him, if that) and was escorted to the gym where hundreds of students gathered to comfort each other. I ended up holed up in the corner of one of the bleachers with one of my best friends, Konrad, where I listened to Animal Collective’s Purple Bottle for the first time (I had read the lyrics on his AIM away message days before and was really curious to hear the actual song). I don’t know how much the emotional intensity of that day impacted my relationship to Animal Collective, but I was barely able to listen to almost any other Music for the next few years. It was the most obsessed I’ve ever been with any Music and it’s hard to choose one song by them for this list. But I actually selected Winters Love because it particularly sweeps me up into a sort of magical wintry world that I’m missing from my current home in LA. Also, later in my Senior Year, my friends and I performed Winters Love at our school’s Acoustic Cafe night. I think we wrangled together 9 people or so last minute to all strum, tap, bang, yell and hum along. I remember the applause from the crowd of students and parents being rapturous and like we were able to convey to the normie world at large a sliver of the magic that we felt AnCo had provided us.
3. Joanna Newsom | En Gallop
I have distinct memories of coming back to my home on Long Island during winter breaks from College and just driving around town, from friend’s house to friend’s house in the cold and sometimes snowy nights. Joanna Newsom’s album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, was a revelation at the time. Her voice was so different and high and squeaky and it was the only time I’d ever listened to harps. I loved her advice to never get so attached to a poem, you forget truth that lacks lyricism as I struggled to do just that! Her quick little complaints of the laws of Property and the Free Economy also quietly foreshadowed my current obsession with Leftist politics...
4. Mount Eerie | Through The Trees Pt. 2
I moved out from New York for the first time in my life right after College for an internship with the US Geological Survey in Olympia, Washington. Those six months were an uncomfortable combination of incredible Excitement to be encapsulated by the nature of the Pacific Northwest as well as incredible Loneliness - away from my friends for the first time in my life, I often found myself glued to my phone or computer as I couldn’t seem to fully enjoy this exciting new place without a friend. I fell in love with this song at that time and, to this day, feel that there’s been no song as poignant about the critique of the Romanticism of Nature. Phil Elverum sings about how there is no other world: mountains and websites and asks can you find a wildness in your body and walk through the store after work, holding it high? I feel like Elverum captured all the beauty of his Nature-as-Romance songs in way that could be critical of it and still just as beautiful. Meh, in actuality it just might have done that for me, because Elverum also sings I meant all my songs not as a picture of the woods, but just to remind myself that I briefly live. He knew!
5. Cloud | Melting Cassatt
My friend Kenny and I rode bikes across the country from New York to Los Angeles. It was easily the greatest thing I’ve done in my life. Around the time we reached Colorado, Tyler sent us the demos for his newest album, Zen Summer. Kenny and I were in love with the album. We would countdown 3, 2, 1 then sync our iPods to listen together while being blown about by headwinds on the sides of Wyoming’s Interstate 80. It was truly a time of Magic in my life and one of our best friends created the soundtrack to it: Extra Magical. Melting Cassat particularly gets me because of its locational focus on David Welds, a beautiful beach spot from our hometown on Long Island that has achieved near mythical status from the nostalgia of our late teens and early 20s.
6. Angel Olsen | Lights Out
When I got to LA, I stayed with Tyler and a few other friends from home in New York. I was excited to be in a new place, having completed this awesome journey, but a couple of us just had so much trouble finding work. For a while we were unemployed and discouraged and spent most of our time drinking beer and watching The Sopranos from beginning to end. I felt like a failure and like giving up - it was a tough feedback loop of Depression. One of the few things I did to get myself out of the house was bike to Lake Balboa park with this in my headphones and I just felt so motivated by the song. Sometimes being told you're on your own could be really disheartening and demoralizing, but for some reason I just felt like Angel Olsen was the ultimate artist, full of Wisdom, and the way she sang was inspiring and totally motivated me to not give up. It took three months, but I eventually got a temp job and started getting out of the house and having a life again. Also of note: just before moving out of LA I went to an Angel Olsen show where several friends had to leave the venue in the middle of her set because it was so emotionally powerful that it made them sick. She is incredible.
7. Mazzy Star | Give You My Lovin
Simple, desperate. It reminds me of my very first days living in NYC. I had just moved into Brooklyn in 2014 with the aforementioned Konrad, and his girlfriend was playing Music from her laptop for hours, none of which interested me. Then this song popped on and passed by pleasantly in the background. At the end I looked up and Konrad had popped his head out from the kitchen and we simultaneously requested for it to be played again and again. About three years later he actually covered it on a compilation we did. This is one of those songs that was the only one I could listen to, nothing else satisfied for at least a week. Now, beyond just sonic quality, the lyrics really get me. She’s just so pathetic! The song just goes back and forth between how the guy (assumption?) isn’t into her/has said bad things about her/reminds her of Rain… To how dedicated she is to loving him and know she’s meant for him, etc. It can be a little embarrassing to admit, but at times aren’t we all that pathetic?
8. Bob Dylan | It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
I grew up hating Bob Dylan even though my dad loved him and tried to play his Music all the time. I thought all of his rhymes were dumb and cheap. It took until I was in my mid-20s to discover this gem and it fully converted me. Later I saw Dont Look Back (the Pennebaker documentary that followed Dylan on a UK tour) and was totally charmed by the shots where Bob out-cools Donovan in the hotel room using this song. I never quite grasped what he means entirely in this one, but the message of move on! is clear enough. I still get chills every time I hear the last line.
9. Sibylle Baier | Forget About
Tyler showed me her a while back, but it didn’t click until months later when I was listening to a live recording of a Trouble Books show and her song was played in the background between sets. That same winter I had been radicalized by anarchist texts and had chosen to quit my Masters program to become a teacher (I decided the next year to finish it), so I was stuck delivering food all over NYC for a while. My days were spent riding my bike, bumming around, and reading constantly. My fondest memories of this song and the rest of the album, Colour Green, are of listening to it on repeat while lazing around on my couch with the streets outside covered in snow, as I spent days doing little more than reading Building Stories by Chris Ware, smoking weed, and philosophizing with my roommates. It was romantic and cozy and I was excited for The Future.
10. A. Savage | Buffalo Calf Road Woman
This one is probably a bit of a stretch because I only discovered it a month ago and I don’t think it has sat quite long enough for me to know if it deserves to be top ten. Nevertheless, this list unintentionally followed my travels throughout the US and I just want to add one to the newest chapter of my life! I’m back in Los Angeles now, living with my girlfriend and trying to take it easy after two years of stressed out teaching in NYC public schools. I have been craving a return to politically critical Punk Music on both my iPod and in my own creative pursuits and I am just so amped on a lot of Andrew Savage’s Music (he’s the singer from Parquet Courts as well). This song documents how Buffalo Calf Road was the Cheyenne woman who is responsible for killing General Custer at the Battle Of The Little Bighorn, revealed by tribe members after more than 100 years of hiding it. Savage makes connections to how after stealing all their oil, Americans have nothing more to take but the Native Americans' Water and Spirit. It’s a catchy tune that exposes an otherwise naive listener like myself to an inspiring story that’s critical of US Imperialism. I hope I could someday contribute likewise!
