An Introduction
A project about music that was meant to be a podcast, but now it's a newsletter...
Welcome to A Mixtape Left Behind.
If you’ve stumbled upon this by chance, my name is Zach Clark and I’m an artist, publisher, and educator who lives in Oakland, California. But, In a past life, my life was the music industry; working in record stores, designing merch, being in bands, touring around the world. I eventually accepted I was a better artist than a musician, and I actually just had talented friends who let me tag along, so I left that life behind. But I still love music — It's one of my favorite things to talk about, ideally late at night, while taking turns picking out what record we will listen to next, reminiscing about the first time we heard it or the time we saw that band live.
A Mixtape Left Behind is a project attempting to capture those conversations and feelings, then translating them into playlists that reflect the eclectic meandering nature of such conversations. I originally thought this would be a podcast that would flow like a college radio show, but after a few attempts, we have arrived here, in a newsletter. This may be for the better, as the playlists may remain more evergreen, and the writing and conversations can stand on their own.
My goal is to send these out roughly once a month to start and future iterations to include interviews or themes from my creative practice. However, for this first time around, I’m going to provide a playlist that serves as a sort of introduction to my musical foundations. The playlist is via Spotify for now, but may that will expand to other streaming services in the future. Thanks for reading & Listening. I’d love to hear what you think. And if you like what I’m doing here, tell your friends!
A Mixtape Left Behind #1: An Introduction
Listen to the playlist here.
Artist. Track. Album
The Rentals. Hello, Hello. Seven More Minutes.
Better Than Ezra. Rewind. Friction Baby.
Paul Simon. Graceland. Graceland.
Genesis. Invisible Touch. Invisible Touch.
Rush. Emotion Detector. Power Windows.
The Appleseed Cast. Forever Longing The Golden Sunsets. Mare Vitalis.
Fleetwood Mac. Everywhere (Live). The Dance.
Pretty Girls Make Graves. The Teeth Collector. The New Romance.
Stars. Time Can Never Kill The True Heart. Heart.
Four Tet. She Moves She. Rounds.
Chai. Nobody Knows We Are Fun. WINK.
For Those I Love. Birthday / The Pain. For Those I Love.
Death Cab For Cutie. A Movie Script Ending. The Photo Album.
Jimmy Eat World. The Most Beautiful Things. Bleed America Deluxe.
Gregory Alan Isakov. Was I Just Another One. Evening Machines.
Owen. Breaking Away. The EP.
Randy Travis. Deeper Than The Holler. Old 8x10.
Damien Jurado. Ohio. Rehearsals For Departure.
Josh Turner. Would You Go With Me. Your Man.
James Taylor. Sweet Baby James. Sweet Baby James.
Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall. Ghost. The Marfa Tapes.
Billy Bragg & Wilco. Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key. Mermaid Avenue.
Squirrel Flower. Pass. Planet (i).
Feist. The Circle Married The Line. Metals.
Billy Joel. Scenes From an Italian Restaurant. The Stranger.
The first two albums I purchased with my own money were Weezer’s Blue album, and Better Than Ezra’s first album, Deluxe. One has gone down in history as one of the best rock records of the late 20th century, the other has been rather forgotten beyond its lead single, which with the exception of a few tracks, is probably for the best. These days, if I’m going to listen to music related to Weezer, it’s actually going to be The Rentals second record “7 more minutes”, the second record from ex Weezer bassist Matt Sharp’s revolving door project which once featured Maya Rudolph on keyboards. I firmly believe it’s one of the most under appreciated rock records to date, and tells us everything we need to know to understand what has happened to Weezer. Better than Ezra’s second record Friction Baby was their most successful, and for good reason, as its really really holds up as one of the most consistent 90’s rock records, including multiple hit singles at a time rich in one hit wonders. Rewind, its second track, includes the inspiration for the name of this project.
While Weezer and Better than Ezra are the first records I bought personally, the first records I LOVED were Paul Simon’s Graceland and Genesis Invisible Touch. I have a terrible long term memory, but the story goes I listened to those two cassettes so frequently I broke them, forcing my parents to buy multiple replacements. One of, if not my earliest memory, is sitting in my parents silver Horizon in a parking lot listening to Graceland. It was the 80’s so it’s highly likely my mom left me in the car with it running, Paul Simon keeping me company. But again, that faulty memory can neither confirm nor deny such a faux pas.
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The first concert I ever attended was Rush’s Roll the Bones tour in 1991, which I would have been 7 at the time I believe, and regularly look back with amusement on the thought of my dad thinking taking my sister and I to this concert was an idea of a good time. By just casually existing in the world, whether or not you realize it you are familiar with Rush’s largest rock hits like Tom Sawyer and Spirit of the Radio, especially if you have ever been a fan of a baseball team Jed Lowrie has played for. My favorite Rush records have always been their really synthed out records of the later 80s and early 90s. There's a line in mind that connects these records directly to bands like The Appleseed Cast and atmosphere indie rock of the 90s and early 2000s.
As the Rush & Genesis suggests, I did not grow up in a house with the Beatles or Bob Dylan like many of my friends, and there was zero chance you would hear Stevie Nicks voice travel through our home stereo. I did however grow up in a house where we had TVs in our rooms. Mine even had CABLE! I have this intensely vivid memory of watching Fleetwod Mac’s reunion show, The Dance, while cleaning my room, and then at some point stopping to look up, and standing in the corner for some reason, and just being floored. I also remember having a similar feeling to the first time I heard Prince or Abba, wondering “whoa. I like this. What is this? Wait… should I like this?”. The first instrument I learned to play seriously was bass, and while John McVie’s bass lines were always incredible, the live recording of this album had the bass so high in the mix it made John the star, which might be what made it stand out to me at first. I would never think of Fleetwood Mac and Pretty Girls Make Graves in the same thought typically, but in this context, they somehow work and make sense.
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I wouldn’t bother to listen to any of Fleetwood Mac’s studio records seriously until my early 20’s, while living in New York City. But when I need a time machine to New York, I listen to Stars, who’s first two records I can put on and close my eyes and be standing on a platform underground anywhere in Manhattan, instantly reliving the immense amount of life lived in an incredibly short time. I have a similar image in my mind of standing above ground in Astoria waiting for a train listening to Fourtet, one of my earliest introductions into electronic music that used instruments and found sounds.
For Those I Love’s debut self titled album is a celebration of youth and friendship that is born out of the grief of losing a friend. It’s a rave record about loss and sadness, but the amount of stories about spending time with friends, running around town, listening to music fills me with a joy and hope that's hard to describe exactly. Especially that track Birthday / The Pain. It was a salve for me right before vaccines became widely available and we were so close to being able to see and touch our friends again.
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I remember sitting in my best friend Brandon’s car in the freezing cold outside a suburban strip mall venue when he played Death Cab For Cutie’s Photo Album for me for the first time. 30 seconds in I thought “This is the music I’ve been looking for.” This was around the start of the indie wave for me, including bands like Jimmy Eat World and any band featuring a Kinsella brother, with Owen always being my favorite. His untitled EP takes me back to Irvine California, where I would occasionally co-host my friend Dylan’s middle of the night radio show. When this CD showed up in the promo bin I unknowingly subjected our listeners to a 7 minute acoustic drone track in the middle of what was normally a punk and new wave show. A Denver record label owner in my early adulthood pivoted from punk to putting out basically nothing but country tinged folk rock. He told me once “at some point, you get old enough you don’t just want the fastest loudest thing”. He was in a way responsible for me finding out about Gregory Alan Isakov when he put one of his records out on vinyl. These seem like disconnected thoughts about the same thing.
After Rush, Garth Brooks was the second concert I ever attended. It rained inside the arena during The Thunder Rolls. Coincidentally, the summer going into my senior year of high school, a radio station changed formats and during the transition, played the full extended version of The Thunder Rolls, on repeat, for 3 days. I think we forget how big of a cultural impact Garth Brooks had since he doesn’t allow his music to be on streaming services. But beyond these occurrences, there was not a lot of country music in my life growing up, except when we would go back to Illinois to visit my grandparents. Proud midwestern farm kids, 90’s pop country was all that was allowed in their car, and plenty of it worked its way into my brain, if not begrudgingly at first.
The divide between country and everything else is still incredibly strong as most folks listening habits become way more fluid, which is curious as the line between folk and country just gets blurier. I can’t help but feel it’s an intentional cultural and political choice rather than a musical one. A Randy Travis song is not that much different than an early Damien Jurado song, and they’ve both sang plenty of songs about Jesus, one just did it a lot more overtly. Josh Turner’s voice is an absolute gift from God, much like James Taylor’s ability to tour and churn out records at 73. That said, I fully admit it took a pandemic induced field recording record for me to listen to a Miranda Lambert record, which I’m thankful for because The Marfa Tapes is an incredible piece of art that could only have been created because of Covid related restrictions.
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I’d be remiss to create any kind of introduction to my music identity without including Billy Bragg. No other musician has had a deeper impact on my worldview than Billy Bragg. At an age I was a purist about Punk Rock, discovering Bragg’s records that would include songs about the power of unions paired with legitimate love songs opened a world to me that existed outside of the binary presented to young men in the 80s and 90s, and probably still today unfortunately. Way over yonder in the minor key is from likely his most widely known record, Mermaid Avenue, a collaborative album made with Wilco from unrecorded lyrics by Woody Guthrie.
Squirrel Flowers new album Planet (i) is an early favorite for my album of the yearn and their track “Pass” sounds like it is literally coming from over yonder, while Feist’s Metals bring things right back to Oakland for me, as an album that grounds me solidly in some of the first summers we spent here in the bay area.
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To lead us out, Billy Joel’s The Stranger is for whatever reason the record I put on when you know I’ve hit my stride in the late night music exchange. Scenes from an Italian restaurant will always be the track I will get on my soapbox to convince anyone who will listen that it is, in fact, the greatest song ever written. And so with that in mind, it feels like the proper way to close out this first episode.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first newsletter/playlist thing. It’s all an experiment, so please let me know what you think.
Thanks again.