As per Sledg's suggestion, I started making my Year-End Best of 2008 list. And since I'd much rather make a mix than continue studying for Civil Procedure, I'm jumping the gun a bit and and making a mix containing songs from my favorite albums of 2008. In the interest of continuity, I'm not doing the songs in order of my actual Best Of list. For that, go to my profile. Enjoy!

Just a few things that I've been listening to lately. A lot of stuff from 2008.

A brief respite from my hectic life. This takes on a decidedly old-school flair, with some newish ones thrown in there. I finally had some time to sit back, relax, and reflect a little, and this mix, I hope, carries that kind of mood.

The picture is of my absolute favorite statue in the French Quarter here in New Orleans. It's literally hidden down a random alley, seemingly not caring whether anyone looks at it or not. When you happen upon it, you kind of have to do a double take. It's great.

God made mud,
God got lonesome,
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!",
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way that I can feel the least bit important is to think
of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honour!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait ...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was ...
And who was in my karass ...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

Here is my big comeback mix. Everyone likes a comeback story, right?

I took a trip to New Orleans this past weekend, so naturally I spent a lot of time in airports. Even with the inevitable delays and hassles of flying, I absolutely love to do it, especially at night. This mix is for listening both at the airport and mid-flight whilst peering out the window tens of thousands of feet below you.

P.S. Sorry I've been totally MIA for a long while. I've been very busy! It turns out I'll be spending the next three years in New Orleans doing law school at Tulane. Between that and graduating and such, I haven't had too much time to listen to music, let alone make mixes.

I've taken quite a long hiatus from the Collective, but now I'm back. My absence has been due to a lot of things, but most of all it's because my life is very much up in the air at the moment, so my free time has largely been spent in constant panic of where I'm going to be in the next few years. I'm graduating college in May, and (presumably) heading off to law school in the Fall. I have no idea where that will be quite yet, hence my general unease about the whole situation.

I find myself wondering if I'll ever see any of these people again after I graduate to go off and do my own thing. I could be in D.C., New Orleans, Chicago, Portland, or even just up the road in Tallahassee: who knows!? So here's a sort of travel mix - an aural journey through some of the things that are floating through my head right this minute. Enjoy!

Winter is my absolute favorite season. There's a few reasons for this, but I think one major one might be the fact that I've lived in the state of Florida my entire life, and I can probably count the number of times I've seen snow on one hand - this means that I've never really experienced any of the "bad" qualities of Winter, like shoveling snow, weeks at a time with no sunlight, and day after day of sub-zero temps. Florida Winters are much milder: we're lucky if it dips into the 30's, and if god-forbid we get to below freezing, the local news outlets begin to act like the apocalypse is nigh. Regardless, I've always wanted to experience a full, "real" Winter, because cold weather nights are what I basically live for. I can't think of anything better than walking down a city street in the middle of the night when it's in the 20's, just you and your thoughts to keep you company. All of these songs serve the purpose of accompanying me on one of these hypothetical walks. Hopefully they'll set just the right mood.

I'm going to an Apples in Stereo concert tonight, so I need a mixtape to listen to on the way there. This is that mixtape. It's fairly random.

It's my birthday, and these are some songs I really like.

I go to school at the University of Florida. The school is in Gainesville, FL, a small-ish town in North-Central Florida. Gainesville has all the trappings of a typical college town: it's in the middle of nowhere, a pretty sizable population of townies (ACR's as well call them, short for "Alachua County Residents), as well as a plentiful supply of alcohol in the form of liquor stores, restaurants, clubs, and bars. There's only one thing missing from this veritable cornucopia of alcohol options: the 40 oz. For a reason that no one I've talked to has ever been able to pinpoint, Florida law prohibits the sale of beer bottles bigger than 32 ounces. It boggles the mind, really, as us students never have a shortage of options when it comes to beer - it usually comes in the form of a keg (which holds 124 cups of beer, if memory serves me correctly). But the novelty of a 40 oz is definitely still alive.

There's a solution to this problem: Georgia. Gainesville is about 45 minutes South of the state line, so it's definitely a manageable drive. Oftentimes throughout the few years I've been here, some friends and I are sitting around bored with nothing to do on a weeknight. Invariably, someone mentions it: "Hey, let's go on a beer run. TO GEORGIA." Screw our 8 AM classes the next morning - if it's out in the open, it's bound to happen. So a few of us pile in a car and head off into the night. This is the story of one of those nights, and one of the mixtapes that accompanies us.

On this particular night, it was a Saturday around 11 PM. My travelling buddies were friends Andrew, a pothead from New Orleans, and Chris, an eccentric-bordering-on-uptight, country-loving Southerner from Bradenton, FL, a small "Southern" suburb on the outskirts of Tampa. And then there's me, a slightly preppy and slightly indie kid. We're all good friends, however, and the mood is genial. Andrew is driving, bringing along plenty of pot to make our journey up I-75 a little more enjoyable. Chris is in the back with the cooler of beer providing comic relief, and I'm riding shotgun, put in charge of the music. I have to tread these waters lightly, though: with this kind of crowd, "indie" music won't exactly fly. The standard fare will be southern rock, with sprinkings of other stuff mixed in there, hoping they won't notice too much.

This is the story of our journey to get beer, just in a bigger size.

For the longest time I suffered with a problem I'm sure many of you also suffer with: lack of hard drive space on my puny laptop, it being packed to the gills (or gigs, for that matter) with my digital music collection. I officially "ran out" of room a few months ago, and have since been pretty stagnant with my music listening.

But I have a job, and therefore I have money (a little bit, at least). So I recently went to my local Best Buy and got myself an external hard drive. It's a good thing. I have since been able to listen to all the music I've been meaning to get. This mixtape is a swath of that new music. Some of it is by bands that I had never heard before. Some of it is by bands I had known and loved already, but I just hadn't gotten around to listening to their new stuff. So here's what I've been missing out on....

Here is my potpourri mixtape, humbly submitted for your approval.

I'm feeling pretty down at the moment; for no particular reason, really. So here are some sad songs. Or at least some songs that won't interfere with my mood, too much.

Also, the lyrics in my sad mixes don't always fit the mood. I mostly listen for the music when I get in these kind of moods.

There are a couple reasons I chose the '07 team. One, my musical tastes sucked major ass pre-2000, at least. Secondly, there's nothing greater than the immediacy of the present. Being alive at this moment in musical time is awesome - there are so many kick-ass albums being made every day it's hard to keep up. '90-'97 was ok - it had plenty of great tracks - but it can't compare to what's happening RIGHT NOW. I'll take a quote from SLC Punk:

"Bob: You tell me if this doesn't rock
Stevo: This isn't anything.
Bob: Just give it a chance:
Stevo: What is it?
Bob: What is it?
Stevo: Yeah, what is it, Bob?
Bob: It's new."

Working sucks. Living at home with your parents for the Summer sucks even more. Studying for the LSAT might be the worst one (I take it next month). So yeah, I don't get a lot of time to relax between all of this. Here's a mix that I threw together to relax and get my mind off of all this other shit. Here ya go!

I have a Summer internship at a law firm. I know it'll be really beneficial for me with law school and such, but it's pretty draining/boring. This is the mix that helps me release some tension on the commute home after a rough day at the office. A lot of fast-paced distorted guitars to ease the pain.

Today, all of a sudden, I got nostalgic for a couple Summers ago. It was just one of those Summers that lasted forever, mostly due to the fact that it was painfully boring. It was the Summer after my first year at college, and I was living with my dad in a po-dunk suburb in south Jacksonville. I had a shitty retail job selling clothes to mostly middle-aged women that didn't pay me near enough money.

Why am I nostalgic for this time, you may ask? Well, I had absolutely no responsibility - my dad is just as laid back as me, and when I wasn't shilling blouses I was eating hot dogs watching baseball on the couch all day with the pops. I had [a little] extra spending money that I mostly blew on CD's of stuff that I had only recently discovered, and these CD's provided the background music for my frequent joyrides speeding around back country roads with the windows down and the stereo blaring. This is a mixtape of my Summer of 2005.

I've been in one of those moods lately, especially tonight - the kind that sees me wanting to sit alone in my room with the shutters drawn and my subwoofer turned way up, just to get that warm feeling in my chest. Not everyone can sleep to this kind of music, but I love to. It's not strictly a sleep mix, either. It can be a rainy day mix, a "It's 3 am but I can't/don't want to sleep mix," or it can just be a "one of those days mix." Hopefully this mix - with all it's fuzzed-out, bass-heavy grooves - will help someone else who wants that deep-in-your-chest feeling.

My goal since I have arrived at college is to bag a scenester chick. A bit shallow? Yes, but everyone needs goals in life, amirite? Normally someone with my level of dorkiness when it comes to music - indie music, notheless - who by all accounts is moderately attractive would at least be batting around .300. Not me. I've got the big goose egg. I think I know, however, why I've failed miserably every time I go to the "indie" club and try to talk to a nice, vintage-tee-wearing girl: I'm a little too preppy for their taste. They see me, and they smell frat-boy phony who just wants to see how the other half lives. How am I to show them that I have substance and a varied music collection, while also having a closet full of polos and seersucker?

INDIE DANCE PARTY

Here's the plan: a massive indie dance party at my place, complete with a dance floor, a fridge fully-stocked with PBR, and some kick-ass music that'll get people moving, and hopefully dancing a little closer to me. It's so perfect, it's gotta work.



I was really tempted to just re-upload my previous mixtape entitled "Indie Dance Party," but I knew that might not fly around here. Also, I know that I can make it better, stronger, faster, more booty-shakingly awesome.

Florida's a crazy place. It's probably the only place in the world where you can find so many different cultures crammed into one unified state. You have your traditional "Southerners" up in the North and the Panhandle, you have a very international metropolitan area in Miami, with pockets of almost entirely Spanish-speaking communities, you have the Northern transplants coming from New England and New York that retire to Palm Beach, Broward County, as well as the Southwest coast in places like Naples. In addition to that, you have Disney that dominates Central Florida, which is crazy enough as it is.
I've always wanted to make a "tribute" to my home state, where I've lived all my life in almost every corner of the place (from Miami to Broward to Jacksonville to Orlando to Gainesville) and have experienced first-hand the schizophrenia that is Florida. Florida is famous for a thousand different types of music - southern rock, punk, ska, latin, blues, folk, hardcore, and boy bands. Because of this, this mix is a bit eclectic. But I hope that it'll display the kind of love-hate relationship most Floridians have with their home state.

This mix was really fucking hard, mostly because I didn't just want to do a "best of" tape. I figured that if absolutely everything pertaining to art, music, and literature had been destroyed, then it would be my job, as the sole provider of all human cultural achievement before the year 2007, to teach the future about as many of these achievements as possible. Knowing that, I tried to include many genres, as well as cover a large time period. So think of this as a very rudimentary "history" of music in the past century or so.

Here's a mixtape filled with the most interesting male vocalists (along with one female, for good measure) around in the indie/rock/music scene today. They're one of the reasons you love the music, as well as one of the reasons a lot of people can't really dig it. So give it to a person who either a) can appreciate an interesting vocal style, b) digs this type of music, or c) someone you don't particularly like. Enjoy!

Are you just a little "indie"? Do your friends struggle to understand why your music is just a little "weird"? Do you like to dance? Do your friends sometimes groan when they come over and see you playing with the music? Well then this mix is for you! Welcome to my indie dance party, where everyone is expected to dance, have a good time, drink, and be just a little bit "pretentious," but not too much.