Friendos –
In January, 2015, I recalled a snippet I’d read about how Cameron Crowe had a hobby of making a new mixtape every month. Mixtape-happy as I already was in life at that point, I’d maxed out at around four or five a year, even in the Spotify age, so the idea of one-a-month seemed like just the right kind of daunting – a great background/foreground project while navigating life with a then-two-year-old, a fulltime job and overwhelming creative pursuits.
And here we are a solid decade later. Fuckin’ sheesh.
First, the bad news: I’m gonna take a break from the one-a-month grind. Lately, it’s become less about the process (track selection, sequencing) than the result (the finished mix), and while I like the ends, I miss finding joy in the means. I’m not saying I’m done forever – I’ll always be a mixtape guy – just for the moment.
Now the good news: this isn’t a period, it’s an ellipsis. What they call in poetry and music a “cæsura.”
So with that perspective, here’s one more mix for you that’s not just a break, but a break from the norm; instead of a curation of new and old music I’m enjoying this month, it’s an autobiography:
One song per year I’ve been alive.
This isn’t just a series of “NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL …” picks – anybody can do that – but songs that I not only love to pieces, but that (with a few reasonable exceptions) are a cache of memory, feeling, sense, what-have-you, from the year they dropped. Ultimately, this is as personal a mix I’ve ever made, both broadly and narrowly, and I hope you enjoy it.
And look, this is still curated as shit – possibly moreso than any of its 151 big brothers and sisters – and as for methodology, the “why” behind each song’s inclusion is in the track listing below. The “how” was a motherfucker, and honestly, if I wasn’t dropping this today, I’d go a few more rounds on each entry.
And with that, here, have:
S O U ND TR A C K I N G: A Steel Ape Sessions Cæsura
WITH!
1. England Dan & John Ford Coley – I’d Really Love to See You Tonight (1976)
Much as I hate to start off with a cheat, I have little firsthand knowledge of the music scene in the year I was born, and to be honest, this one didn’t strike a chord with me till about 2006, around the time I proposed to my then-girlfriend/now-wife. Its denim-and-cigarettes beauty knocked me on my ass, and I’m proud to share a birth year with it.
2. Chuck Mangione – Feels So Good (Radio Edit) (1977)
Ok, this one actually is a personal recollection, maybe not from the year of its release, but certainly not long after. This was a big one in my house growing up, and probably the first reputation I cultivated was as Chuck Mangione’s youngest fan. There’s a lot of juice in its jazzless jazz and funkless funk.
3. Cheap Trick – Surrender (1978)
Again, I was not huffing Winstons behind the gym on the hood of Derek’s Camaro when this one dropped, and wouldn’t really connect with it till the 90s or aughts, when it became a karaoke staple for me. I later performed it a bunch with Skelter (whose sophomore album Sip O’ Tea for the Devil features MC skits by yours truly), including at their 2006 Halloween show, where bassist Greg Ross, in full Gene Simmons HMU, waited till “Got my KISS records out” to spit out a mouthful of blood. It was rock n’ roll as shit.
4. Mickey Mouse Disco – The Greatest Band (1979)
Here’s where the autobiography starts to kick in – I vividly remember not only owning this LP, but listening to this particular song a bunch (equally vivid, my mishearing the prechorus’s exhortation to “Keep dancing” as “Keith Bandstand”)
5. Kate Bush – Babooshka (1980)
I don’t know the year I first heard it, but I remember my older cousin Steven (bound for art school) walking my sister and me through this banger, whose plot essentially boils down to “Goth Piña Colada Song.” I reconnected with it years later, and feel it’s earned its spat here.
6. Wilhelmenia Fernandez – La Wally (1981)
From the movie Diva, which centers on Fernandez as a soprano who’s never been recorded (until a bootleg of this aria sets of a whole chain of events for the bootlegger), and which is fittingly/paradoxically Fernandez’s first-ever recording.
7. Billy Joel – Laura (1982)
I grew up in a big Billy Joel house, and this album cut off The Nylon Curtain always stuck in my head for its use of metaphor that perplexed the shit out of me at age five (certainly no more than Glass Houses‘ “Dom Perignon in your hand and a spoon up your nose” had a year earlier).
8. Huey Lewis and the News – Walking On A Thin Line (1983)
Here we arrive at the first album I ever owned, first on cassette, later on CD, LP and digital (a club joined only by The Posies Dear 23 and The Police’s Synchronicity). This one always spoke to me more than the singles – not for its subject matter (which, years later, I was stunned to learn was about a mistreated Vietnam vet, and then was stunned to discover I had never noticed earlier) but it’s insanely satisfying chord progression, especially the hook which is sweetly harmonic while spelling certain doom. Top marks for Chris Hayes’s guitar solo which is up there with the 80s’ best, I said what the fuck I said.
9. “Weird” Al Yankovic – Midnight Star (1984)
Despite my dalliances with hardcore acts like Joel and Lewis, I wasn’t really into pop music until close to the 90s, so while ’84 can boast an insane share of artists’ bests, I wasn’t hip to them. But everybody – everybody – was into “Weird” Al, and I was no exception. In 3-D was the first place I heard about songs like “Smoke on the Water,” “Hey Joe,” and “LA Woman,” but not knowing the difference between the originals and the parodies (except for the most well-known ones), I gravitated toward this uptempo bop about grocery store tabloids. Kids are weird.
10. John Parr – St. Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion) (1985)
This one runs me right back to the bus ride home from summer camp every time, and while it’s become a shorthand for grandiose, synth-horned 80s pop (see its pitch-perfect use in the training montage in Into the Spider-Verse), to me it’s an argument for the legitimacy of grandiose, synth-horned 80s pop.
11. El DeBarge – Who’s Johnny? (1986)
When I learned this song was written by Peter Wolf of J. Geils Band, I was like “Of course, that makes perfect sense! Melodically it’s clearly from the same wellspring as ‘Centerfold,’ but with a little 808 and pop syncopation and … oh, it’s by a Peter Wolf who wasn’t the Peter Wolf of J. Geils Band? Yeah, that makes more sense.” No shade on Huey Lewis (see above honorifics) but if I’ve ever got a drunk Paul Allen in my living room, this is the song I’m pontificating on before the axe falls.
12. R.E.M. – Finest Worksong (1987)
This is admittedly a cheat – I didn’t get into R.E.M. fully until the release of Out of Time in 1991, and strike two is that I got into “Finest Worksong” from its position on Eponymous, where Mike Mills’s bass-heavy outro was the lead-in to “It’s the End of the World As We Know It.” But the R.E.M. albums that have meant the most to me at the times of their release – the holy trinity of Out of Time, Automatic for the People, and Monster – had the misfortune of coming out in super-crowded years, and I couldn’t not have R.E.M. on here. Anyway, this one feels like it never gets the love it should.
13. Breathe – How Can I Fall? (1988)
The first time a girl gave me a tape, it was of this song, and I was so touched by the gesture I didn’t realize she was breaking up with me. Ah, l’amour …
14. The B-52’s – Deadbeat Club (1989)
In further candor, I didn’t get into Cosmic Thing till 1990, but that’s still in the halo of its original release, so I stand firm on including this. At the time, nothing sounded more romantic than crashing a party down in Normaltown or crushing 25¢ beers at Allen’s, and tbh, nothing sounds better now.
15. Madonna & Mandy Patinkin – What Can You Lose? (1990)
I’m glad Dick Tracy won Sondheim his Oscar, and I’m glad he won for the (arguably better than this) “Sooner Or Later (I Always Get My Man)” but this one always hit me hard, especially with the odd but effective pairing of Patinkin’s falsetto coo with Madonna’s sultry pout, wheeling around the melancholy of Sondheim’s out-of-period melody.
16. Vladimir Cosma – La Gloire De Mon Père (1991)
This was one of the hardest years to pick a delegate from on the whole list, what with ’91 being the year of Ten, Nevermind, The Globe, Doubt, Pornograffitti, Use Your Illusion 1 & 2, Black Album, Low End Theory, Blue Light Red Light, Achtung Baby, Badmotorfinger, Out of Time, Trompe le Monde, Gish, Bandwagonesque, Seas of Cheese, Apocalypse ’91, Into the Great Wide Open, God Fodder, Soul Cages, Dangerous, and no judgment, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
This was the year that I started to catch up with the music around me – and the year I got my first CD player – and to be honest, that’s a fair bit of logjam to try and sift through to find a champ. But in rode a dark horse, in the form of Vladimir Cosma’s My Father’s Glory, the first of two movies in Yves Robert’s duo of Marcel Pagnol’s childhood memoir. Cosma’s overture sets the tone perfectly, cicada chirps blending into timorous woodwinds, growing to a triumphal, mountainous swell.
17. Alice In Chains – Right Turn (1992)
Another nailbiter year to try and find one perfectly representative track, but I powered through, landing on this cut from Alice In Chains’s SAP EP, with guest shots by Chris Cornell and Mark Arm turning it into one of the best 206 collabs since the then-still-new Singles soundtrack.
18. Liz Phair – Never Said (1993)
I’ll fully admit, I didn’t exactly get Exile In Guyville when I first listened to it in ’93-94 – as a topic, sex still overloaded my circuits too much for me to connect with the levels of obsession, regret, and resilience across its 18 perfect tracks – but what drew me to its leadoff single was its never-fail chord progression which I’d loved since I first heard it on The Beatles “You Won’t See Me.” I’m glad I got hooked and stuck around till more than just the vibes made sense to me.
19. Beastie Boys – Sure Shot (1994)
If I were a pro-wrestler, this would be my walkout music, and that’s really the only way I can sum it up.
20. Dionne Farris – I Know (1995)
If you’ve read this far, it’s doubtful you’re reading in bad faith, so please don’t try to check my math that Dionne’s Wild Seed Wild Flower came out in October, 1994. “I Know” dropped as a single the following January, but all that aside, it was absolutely wall-to-wall on VH1 the entire summer of 1995 (sandwiched between Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There For You” and Chris Isaak’s “Somebody’s Cryin’“). Technically Dionne’s one hit which makes a substantial case for her having way more (esp since there are heavy hitters all over WSWF, including a “Blackbird” cover nearly 30 years before Beyoncé’s).
21. Soul Coughing – “Soft Serve” (1996)
I got instantly hooked when I first heard “Down to This” off Ruby Vroom as a college radio DJ, so Irresistible Bliss was a release day buy for me. While it’s all hits/no skips, “Soft Serve” has to go down as one my favorite Side A Track 2’s, a perfect vibe shift from the album opener “Super Bon Bon.”
(This whole album is me playing Sonic 2 on my roommate’s Genesis, and I cannot recommend it highly enough as a video game soundtrack.)
22. Space – “Female of the Species” (1997)
Gather round, young’ins, I’ll tell you ’bout how movies used to have soundtracks you had to buy on CD, and even though the end credits of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery runs the album version of Space’s “Female of the Species,” the Austin Powers soundtrack had the “Fembot Remix” which was much weaker. Good news is, it forced me to pick up Spiders, which has more to offer than just this one track, but it definitely has this one track, unlike certain soundtracks.
23. David Holmes – The Trunk Scene (1998)
1998 was my first brush with long-term, undiagnosed depression, a condition I found myself in pretty much starting January 1, the morning after a New Year’s Eve party capping off what had been a pretty spectacular, adrenalized, serotonized 1997.
It didn’t help that I was in my last semester of college, facing for the first time a life without structure bearing down fast. Helping matters less was the dissolution of a relationship that had begun the previous summer, gradually winding down to nothing around May of ’98.
In the fog between graduation and my plans to move to New York at the end of the summer, I went to a late-night movie with friends to see the new Clooney movie, largely on the strength of its poster, with no idea heading in that I was about to see my favorite movie of all time.
Let’s blow right past the pitch-perfect casting, Soderbergh’s rarely-better direction, Scott Frank’s A+ adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel, Anne Coates’s editing, Eliot Davis’s cinematography, Betsy Heimann’s wardrobe, et al, and focus on David Holmes’s note-perfect 70s-funk-soul-meets-90s-trip-hop score, best exemplified by the showpiece of the movie’s first act, the Trunk Scene.
I remember listening to this with a buddy at the video store we worked at, nodding as it faded out … then both going “DAAAAAMN” when it comes back in with the drum fill.
This was my intro to Holmes (see more below), and this was all it took. I was in for keeps.
Footnote: Holmes was a late replacement for Soderbergh’s semi-regular composer Cliff Martinez, who completed a score (enough to get credited on the poster) that was rejected by the producers. To this day I’m dying to hear Martinez’s take on the material.
24. Mike Errico – Daylight (1999)
So, I did indeed move to New York that Labor Day, and one night my friend, roommate and ride-or-die Jamie said “Let’s go to CB’s Gallery, see who’s playing.” Who was playing was singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Mike Errico – just him, a guitar, a harmonica, and some live-loop tools, and I was hooked. I snapped up his Vicious Circle EP at the show, and waited for his LP debut the following spring, Pictures of the Big Vacation, which featured more fully fleshed-out versions of most of what was on VC, including this signature song of his.
To me, he just felt like what I wanted my NY experience to feel like, with the added bonus of feeling like he was my discovery (he was not) and that I was his biggest fan (I probably was not).
I met him some months later outside Sam Ash (RIP) on 47th St., and we chatted for a few minutes, and he could not have been cooler about how weird I was probably being. Good guy, great song.
25. David Holmes – 69 Police (2000)
Speaking of David Holmes, after Out of Sight, I looped back on his earlier albums, This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash the Seats and Let’s Get Killed. Now the former never connected for me, but the latter became my “walking around NY soundtrack,” so when he dropped his follow-up Bow Down to the Exit Sign, I was all over it … about a year after its release. (Look, I was broke as a joke in 2000, sue me).
Sampling Le Orme’s “Ad Gloriam,” but adding a loop to create a more satisfying fourth-measure resolution, the track works as a great midpoint on the album (mirrored by the more downbeat finale “Hey Lisa” you can’t imagine how thrilled I was the following year when Holmes and Soderbergh reteamed for Ocean’s Eleven, and used “69 Police“ to bring down the curtain. (They’d repeat this curtain-call trick on Twelve and Thirteen with Dave Grusin’s “Ascension to Virginity” on the former and The Motherhood’s “Soul Town” on the latter)
26. Ash – Burn Baby Burn (2001)
In the summer of 2001, my then-g.f. and I took a trip to Spain, roadtripping into Portugal and France with the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on the MD player. Along the way, we watched a fair bit of MTV Europe, and in a hostel in Madrid, I caught the video for the lead-off single from Ash’s Free All Angels and was ALL IN. Disregarding for a moment the very 2001, lad-mag-coded cheerleaders littering the video, Tim Wheeler’s hard-charge power-pop sat neatly between my twin obsessions at the time – Weezer’s Green Album and the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack.
For completists, there’s also a remix on Ash’s Intergalactic Sonic Sevens compilation that drops out everything but guitar and vox after the bridge, and while it’s not the version I cut my teeth on, it still slaps.
27. The Breeders – Off You (2002)
I’m walking through the Village in the late spring of 2002 (a year that already gave me Badly Drawn Boy’s About A Boy sdtk and Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi), on the phone with my friend Jim, when I see a blow-up in the window of Tower Records (RIP) hipping me to the release (and for that matter the existence) of The Breeders’ Title TK. In one swift move, I tell Jim The Breeders have a new record out and I’m gonna have to call him back, turn on my heel into the store, and buy the damn thing.
And look, it’s folly to rank art (not that that stops us), but this is easily The Breeders’ best song. Wait, second, after “Saints.” Wait, third, after “Cannonball” and “Saints.” Wait, fourth after, look it’s folly to rank art.
28. The White Stripes – You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket (2003)
And now we enter the iPod era. Lemme tell you, if you’re in a long distance relationship with a girl in Boston, and your bus back home pulls out on a gray Sunday after you’ve spent the weekend together, and the GodPod throws this, it’s looking out for you.
29. The Go! Team – Friendship Update (2004)
I finished writing a pretty great screenplay that I always envisioned having this as the end credits song for, so I used to put this on a loop in the back of a cab and visualize the main-on-end that would accompany it.
30. Mercury Rev – Across Yer Ocean (2005)
The main spiritual ancestor to The Steel Ape Sessions was DJ Colleen Crumbcake’s PANTONE 292 CD Club, of which I was a member, along with a dozen or so other people. When it was your month, you made a mix CD, and mailed out copies to every other member. This one was on the mix that landed the month I moved to Brooklyn, and it will always sound to me like the breeze on my neck on the rooftop. Thanks, forgotten CD mixmaster. You changed lives.
31. Outkast ft. Scar & Sleepy Brown – The Train (2006)
I was largely unemployed the summer Outkast’s Idlewild album dropped, but took comfort in the melancholy-tinged reassurance of this low-boil banger.
32. Beatsteaks – Jane Became Insane (2007)
More MTV Europe punk-pop, this time from a bonkers German quintet getting heavy rotation during my honeymoon in Paris.
33. TV On The Radio – Red Dress (2008)
I’ll admit, Dear Science was a slow burn for me, even though I’d been obsessed by a few of the tracks on 2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain. But once it landed for me, it stuck.
34. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson & the Suite for Ma Dukes Orchestra – Untitled/Fantastic (2009)
I was late to the party on J Dilla in general, but not long after I moved to LA, I heard a track from Atwood-Ferguson’s Suite for Ma Dukes and promptly investigated. It took me a little while past that point to really dig in, but then one morning I woke up with this in my head and that was it.
I love Slum Village’s OG version, but the way Miguel takes Dilla’s beat from delicate and furtive to intense, thundering rapture without changing the shape of the piece tells you all you need to know about the legendary gone-too-soon beatsmith.
35. Dum Dum Girls – Jail La La (2010)
More KCRW goodness, gleaned during months of unemployed driving-around-LA time-passing.
36. Cashier No. 9 – Gold Star (2011)
Produced by David Holmes, here’s a gem off the sole album by this Belfast act.
37. Hot Chip – Let Me Be Him (2012)
I was aware of Made in the Dark, but not really captivated by it. But then came 2012’s In Our Heads and the switch flipped. Bathe in this one, from its opening loops to slide-guitar send-off.
38. Starcadian – He^rt (2013)
Heartbreak with a groove on this concept album excerpt from this intersection of Daft Punk & Alan Parsons.
39. The Afghan Whigs – Matamoros (2014)
Years after I thought I’d heard the last from the guys behind my 12th grade life preserver Gentlemen, they came back not having missed a step on this SubPop banger.
40. Wilco – Where Do I Begin? (2015)
I didn’t get into Wilco till I moved to Los Angeles, and even then, a few of their albums slid by me. The surprise drop of their Star Wars album (released by total coincidence four months before The Force Awakens), on the other hand, hit my inbox and within minutes I’d snapped it up; it became the first of theirs I felt belonged to me, and even though the album may not be in their masterpiece class, at least a couple of its cuts rank right up there with their best.
41. Skylar Gudasz & Django Haskins – Thirteen (2016)
I was there the night they recorded Thank You, Friends: Big Star’s Third Live, so one of those cheering voices is definitely mine. Less audible is the deep swoon Skylar Gudasz’s voice put me in, but it’s there all the same.
42. Natalia Lafourcade & Los Macorinos – Soledad y el Mar (2017)
Speaking of swooning, me quisiera sumergir en esta canción.
43. The Coup – Anitra’s Basement Tapes (2018)
One of the deftest touches in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You is the quick-cement establishment of the warmth of Cash’s friend group, presented in a crammed-in-a-car joyride, underscored by this perfect number, before his descent into capitalist tokenism (and, avoiding spoilers, way way worse).
44. Jesus & The Brides of Dracula – Turning Teeth (2019)
I didn’t love David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake, but the centerpiece pop pastiche of its unwinding mystery is a pristine weed-smoke head rush.
45. Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End (2020)
And so, the pandemic. I started lockdown with repeated spins of Stranger In the Alps – go figure I wanted to listen to lie-on-the-floor music – and snapped up Punisher the second it dropped. I Know the End‘s steady rise from Smoke Signals sequel into primal scream is the ideal soundtrack for getting back up again.
46. Remi Wolf – Grumpy Old Man (2021)
Every song I associate with 2021 feels like spring breeze, like change and rebirth. Granted, I spent a lot of that year still locked down, eating edibles and listening to the likes of Silk Sonic and Dua Lipa, but that doesn’t make the feeling any less genuine, exemplified by the busy-bee bassline grows into the groove of the verse and the steady glide of the hook.
47. Beach House – Once Twice Melody (2022)
Some sad personal news put a thumb on the scale of the entirety of 2022, so while the year definitely had its share of upbeat jams – Muna’s Silk Chiffon, Lawrence’s Don’t Lose Sight, Beyoncé’s Cuff It – this liminal space feels like the right way to reflect on the year that was.
48. Lil Yachty – running out of time (2023)
In 2023, I had three transcendent musical experiences:
- My buddy Rich’s 50-person birthday singalong
- Seeing Stop Making Sense on the big screen
- Listening to Lil Yachty’s spiritual cousin to Dark Side of the Moon, Let’s Start Here. on weed
49. Bleachers – Modern Girl (2024)
Confession time, here at the almost-end: I’ve never really fucked with Bruce Springsteen. I don’t dislike him, just found his work to be a hard merry-go-round to hop onto. That said, Jack Antonoff’s longform tribute band slaps.
50. Hrishikesh Hirway ft. Sophie Thatcher – Iris’s Theme (2025)
No idea if this one’s gonna stick, but with its Rosemary’s Baby influence pinned to its sleeve, this theme from Companion is the first one off the line to ring out to me in the new year.
Well, if you’ve read this far, you have my congratulations and thanks. Not 100% sure when the next mix drops, but I can’t see myself staying away for too too long.
Thanks for listening these last ten years. Let’s do this again sometime.
Till then,
Yours in apes,
AG.
The Steel Ape Sessions 