Mixtape – “Exit”

Ah… the humble mixtape!

Those older readers will no doubt fondly recall sitting with a handful of cassettes and their cassette recorders whilst connected up to another player or the radio. Even better if you had a twin deck!

In the age of drag-and-drop playlists and streams, the art of the mixtape is but consigned to history, myth, and legend.

I made hundreds of mixtapes back in the day. Then I progressed to mix-CDs and then mixed-MDs, before switching to mp3-CDs. The modern playlist, albeit good and all, lacks a certain something. Yes, you can create the exact same track listing as you did on a mixtape, but… it’s not real. You can’t hold a playlist. You can’t spend hours and hours working out the best order to maximise the amount of space you have. Despite what online stores will tell you, sharing a playlist with someone just isn’t the same as handing them a mixtape.

Sadly, technology is such that I cannot send every reader a mixtape. However, if you fancy sticking these tracks onto a cassette yourselves… have at it!

The playlist for Exit is made up of 29 tracks… the entire playlist coming in at around 1h 53m. That would nicely fill both sides of one of my old TDK D120s.

In the past, I would write to cassettes. They were always cheaper than CDs. I would create mixtapes for genre and mixtapes for moods. Then, I would choose a tape and write to that. If I had a twin deck available, I would pop two cassettes in and switch between them. More often than not, however, I would go with one artist and play through. I always found that, after a few hours, I had formed a connection with the songs and what I had written. What the artist had intended hardly ever matched with what I had written, but that is the beauty of art. I can recall some songs that I play which most people who know me in real life probably wouldn’t think I’d listen to, yet they are all woven into some story or another.

These days, I generally listen to music on a portable device (a FiiO X5 2Gen for anyone interested). I usually go random, skipping tracks until something ‘calls out’ to me as I write. Those tracks that appeal at the time generally get saved to a playlist for me to repeat as I wish. These are those tracks.

There is no real reason why I listened to these tracks. Some are from the original mixtape that I was listening to on that car journey back in 95. Some are obviously from later. Again, the videos below were chosen purely for their sound and not for any other reason (or because I couldn’t find another). Oddly, I couldn’t find a decent video/clip of Stiltskin‘s ‘America’ (the original 90s Stiltskin that is). It’s the only track that didn’t make this playlist, although I did listen to it a number of times.

I’d say, aside from The Cure, the tracks that got the most play were Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You (a big favourite of mine), The Animals’ House of the Rising Sun, Angel Olsen’s Shut Up Kiss Me (for nostalgic sound), and Soul Asylum’s Somebody to Shove.

So, with the preamble out of the way, here’s the mixtape. Enjoy.

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1. A Forest – The Cure
2. Broken Wings – Mr. Mister
3. Fade Into You – Mazzy Star
4. Don’t Speak – No Doubt
5. Bullet With Butterfly Wings – Smashing Pumpkins
6. Violet – Hole
7. Glycerine – Bush
8. Dreams – The Cranberries
9. Here’s Where The Story Ends – The Sundays
10. Your Ghost – Kristin Hersh
11. Everybody Knows – Concrete Blonde
12. Losing My Religion – Tori Amos
13. Shiny Happy People – R.E.M.
14. California Dreamin’ – The Mamas & the Papas
15. House of the Rising Sun – The Animals
16. About a Girl – Nirvana
17. San Francisco – Scott McKenzie
18. Call Me – Blondie
19. Common People – Pulp
20. Not in Love – Crystal Castles (ft. Robert Smith)
21. Disarm – Smashing Pumpkins
22. There She Goes – The La’s
23. Hey Jealousy – Gin Blossoms
24. Somebody to Shove – Soul Asylum
25. I Need Some Fine Wine and You, You Need to Be Nicer – The Cardigans
26. Happy When It Rains – The Jesus and Mary Chain
27. Hazy Shade of Winter – The Bangles
28. Shut Up Kiss Me – Angel Olsen
29. When My Ship Comes In – Stiltskin

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EXIT is available at Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble

Cinder – Carols for the Damned…

In October, I never got around to releasing the playlist I used whilst writing ‘Cinder’. So, here it is… not exactly seasonal, although, with a glass of mulled wine, a log fire, and a room of candles… it does work.

Actually, the playlist has been public for a couple of months, so maybe you already stumbled upon it. Nah, probably not.

It’s a small playlist. Only 21 tracks. Some of the tracks I also listened to whilst writing ‘A Bump in the Night’. It’s a little ‘darker’ than that playlist, though.

It’s always hard to say which track got more play time. Once again, ‘The Cure’ feature a lot. I’m also rather fond of ‘Cranes’. Alison Shaw’s voice is deliciously haunting. If I could eat it, I probably would. There are one or two tracks that might seem out of place, but they just seemed to appeal at different times during the writing. Memories can be like that. The last track, ‘Mr Self Destruct’ by NIN, was one that I had in mind before I even added it to the playlist.

As always, the videos below were chosen purely for their sound and not for any other reason (or because I couldn’t find another).

So, for those of you tired of listening to carols, have a listen to this selection before retiring for the night… oh, and pleasant dreams!

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1. Three Imaginary Boys – The Cure
2. New Dawn Fades – Joy Division
3. How Beautiful You Are – The Cure
4. Where Fishes Go – Live
5. Speak No Evil – Cocteau Twins
6. Cold – The Cure
7. In The Flat Field – Bauhaus
8. Hot Ride – The Prodigy (ft. Juliette Lewis)
9. Golgotha Tenement Blues – Machines of Loving Grace
10. The River – Nymphs
11. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea – The Cure
12. Lillies – Cranes
13. Night Shift – Siouxsie & the Banshees
14. Mire – Theatre of Tragedy
15. Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus
16. The Figurehead – The Cure
17. Alice – The Sisters of Mercy
18. Come This Far – Cranes
19. No Time To Cry – The Sisters of Mercy
20. Kitty’s Dead – Seraphim Shock
21. Mr Self Destruct – Nine Inch Nails

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CINDER is available at Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble

Tunes in the Night – my writing playlist for “A Bump in the Night”

Those of you that know me or have stumbled across this blog (or some other social media outlet) will know that I like music. A lot.

As with quite a few things, I have varied taste when it comes to music. It’s not always the lyrics that I’m interested in, but the melody. Sometimes, it can even be the memory or emotion that a particular song evokes in me. In these cases, I might not really like the artist at all, but that one song just happened to be playing at a particular point in my life and it got wrapped up inside the memory. The song becomes the trigger or key to unlocking it.

I’m sure this happens to you as well.

For those of you accustomed to these pages, I’ve mentioned some of my musical influences under the page entitled ‘Influences’ (fancy that). That doesn’t mean I listen to all those artists all the time. I often find that, whenever I sit down to start writing a scene or a poem, I just seem to land on the track I want. It’s almost uncanny.

As I continue, I tend to skip tracks unconsciously without interrupting my flow. It’s just the way I work. When I finally pause for a tea-break or whatever I’ll jot down the tracks that stuck with me or any that I just know I need to hear when I’m going to be writing a particular story/scene. Later, I’ll create a playlist for them on my iPod (an old classic click-wheel model) and add to it during the course of writing. To be honest, I prefer vinyl over digital (much how I prefer books to ebooks), but I probably wouldn’t get much writing done if I had to get up and change the record every three or for minutes. I suppose I need to become wealthy enough where I can hire my very own Jeeves… a ‘vinyl-turner’ of sorts… someone to flip the records at a moments notice!

So, since I’ve finished writing A Bump in the Night I’ve decided to reveal the playlist that I listened to whilst writing it. You might not like some of the tracks/artists; you might even wonder how in the hell I can mix them. You might even wonder at my taste in music, but it might also let you catch a glimpse of what was going on inside my head (for those of you that are bored – the YouTube playlist is at the very end of the post).