I’ve been working a lot of doubles and overtime lately, today was set to be my day off but about an hour into my first taste of sleep since Saturday night I got called in. Sure I could rant about how I’m overworked and whatever but I chose to give up my day off to jump back on the hamster wheel when I easily could have kept from answering my phone or simply said no, I didn’t so in the end it was my decision.
As I’m piecing together this weeks mix I’m sitting on the patio at Epoch Coffee it is 80 degrees with a breeze, I have a triple latte and a Camel Light sitting in front of me, all things considered life is good… just one more reason I’m falling in love with Austin at an alarming rate.
If you haven’t been downright impressed with the overflow of incredible genre crossing music this year you are either a huge Nickleback fan or you are Amish, there’s no other logical excuse to complain about the status of music.
Last year when I put the “Best Albums” list together it was one of the first Heycoolkid! posts ever and with all honesty I was ill-prepared. This year I’m putting these albums up with complete confidence. Sure there’s an album or two that should have the made the cut and somehow was overlooked but all excuses aside here are the albums which I thought were the best of 2011:
Time for night drives, passionate crushes, longing breakups, and all-night conversations with the best of friends. Fall is finally here and I can’t help but feel that life just gets better the second i get to zip up a hoody.
I grew up in an exceptionally small town between the edge of suburbia and the middle of nowhere. As far as my memories go when i look back it seems my group of friends will always remain in my memory on endless drives through Podunk (it’s a real town) with the leaves changing and the air cooling off.
If I could go back to one point in time it would be on one of those drives, feeling complete but at the same time fighting back an unspoken worry that with morning would come change, that we would reach the moment called “grown up” and would all say goodbye. Those drives had an undercurrent that whatever we were going to do we had to do it immediately because change was coming, so we drove until the last breathe of night holding on to the moment with the firmest grips and the quietest of hearts.
Never ending conversations with crushes, falling in love through nothing more than words and and the electricity of being so close and talking so quiet, both truly listening. Those first kisses that lit my life on fire, those heartbreaks that destroyed me, and those quiet nights when I’d drive alone and reminisce about it all.
Sitting on the hood of my car next to a close friend, in intense conversations about “what does it all mean,” “is this all that there is to life” and coming to our own conclusions about God and the way everything is broken and pulling apart and yet it all makes sense, it all forms a whole, and how we’re all drawn together by some secret that we couldn’t even begin to understand. How many cigarettes did we smoke in succession on nights like that? How much of anything did we smoke on those nights?
That’s the place I’m at when it comes to making up this playlist. I plan it out all year so that by the time Fall hits and I’m heading down to see my brother in Bloomington or heading back to my hometown to visit family I can pull these songs up on my ipod and feel that fullness once again.
I’m still making memories, I’m growing up but not yet grown up and the friends I have now feel that as well, we’re perpetually in a moment where things are about to change. This fall as with all the ones I’ve known before reminds me to embrace what we have because soon it will be gone, so in a way i guess some things will forever remain the same.
The idea of this playlist is to capture all of that, if there’s one mix other than a solid break-up mix where lyrics carry the entire thing this is it. I really hope you find something on here that makes life better or helps you get through the worse or at the least gives you a friend that understands.
Send me a message or comment with your own playlists I’m interested to see what yours would look like.
“Take a breath just to let it out again
waking up is an excise in trust
that your gonna find something to hold close
in a moonless night i wait for your ghost
oh how we put the days away.”
“We sing with our hero’s thirty three rounds per minute
We’re never going home until the sun says we’re finished
I’ll love you forever if I ever love at all”
“We think of those days while we’re living these ones.
Through highway signs and telephone lines we try and keep in touch.
And I hope you’re in a good place yeah I hope you’re having fun
like so many years ago”
“there’s only three weeks until we reach the great lakes city
when I got the news that that you were with somebody else
and apparently this was going on since before the night I left for you
kissing me wishing me safely”
“Call me a safe bet, I’m betting I’m not
I’m glad that you can forgive, only hoping as time goes, you can forget
…
It’s cold as a tomb, and it’s dark in your room
When I sneak to your bed to pour salt in your wounds”
“I once heard the worse thing
A man can do is draw a hungry crowd.
Tell everyone his name in pride an confidence
But leaving out his doubt.
I’m not sure I bought those words
When I was young I knew most everything.
These words have never meant as much to anyone
As they now mean to me.”
“saw you slip on the icy icy street
and i smiled accidentally
and you swore at the ice and you swore at me
and my heart melted instantly
in the warmth of the strangest thing”
“And maybe blue eyes are more my style.
I don’t know but I’m willing to try.
And maybe I’m dumb, for making you smile.
I don’t knowbut I will in awhile.”
“And I’m afraid to sleep because of what haunts me
Such as living with the uncertainties
That I’ll never find the words to say
Which would completely explain
Just how I’m breaking down”
“Last night I saw the flashing lights I quickly ran outside
neighbor lady told me that Jackie’s youngest boy had died
and I was surprised to see the cops had Jackie handcuffed in the car
until this mornings paper told me that jackie’d gone to far
and now they’re saying Jackie, he aint the only one to blame
because battered children they almost always grow up to do the same
oh you think you know somebody…”
“Well I told him I too had been traveling around
living out of my van from town to town
playing for tips and whatever records I could move
I said I don’t ‘reckin I’ll be making in big
you know it’s hard to get rich off a tour of coffeehouse gigs
he said ‘but yeah ain’t it a blessin’ to do what you want to do’
…andI said I don’t know what I’ve been looking for, maybe me”
“Mother remember the night that that dog had her pups in the pantry
blood on the wall fleas on their paws and you cried til the morning
so may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
songs are like birds flying always over the mountain”
I realize how ridiculously long this post ended up being. I’d debated breaking it up as i had with the “Trapped In Time, Surrounded By Evil, Low On Gas” playlist but that one was easy to breakdown. Although you may only download one or two tracks in my mind it’ll get listened to as a whole (I may have just truly realized why bands hate downloads instead of listening to an entire album). Either way I hope you can look past the length and enjoy.
As usual all songs are for promotional purposes only. If you or a band you represent would like some content removed leave a comment or send me an email (the address can be found in thesection).
