Every year since I turned 21 (or was it 22?) I have made a "Birthday Mix." The rules are simple: I can only include songs that I discovered between birthdays. It's a tool for introspection and review, as well as a chance to express what art was especially impactful in the prior 365 days. Regrettably, I never got around to compiling a mix last year. I was busy and kept putting it off until it was too late.

I think people find music interesting or enjoyable when it is relevant to some experience they've had or when it expresses emotions to which they can relate. When I choose songs for my Birthday Mix, I don't choose them in an attempt to put together the most expressive songs, but I am at least somewhat conscious of the fact that my selections are reflective of my experiences, emotions, or thoughts in the past year. There is no "listen to the lyrics, man, because this is totally what I'm about." However, I am aware that the tone, melody, and lyrics have all shaped how I hear and react to the song and also realize that I may like a song because, well, that is totally what I'm about.

This was a tough transition year. I graduated law school and endured a lengthy and fruitless job hunt. I had gone to law school to do financial regulation or, in the alternative, commercial litigation. Hundreds of applications later (literally), I hadn't landed a single interview. I began networking as a second prong of my job hunt. The process was very trying and I spent a lot of time trying to convince strangers to meet with me for 30-60 minutes so I could pick their brains about the legal market and feel around for job openings. By and large, I met some very nice and generous people who seemed genuinely concerned about the career of a total stranger.

One of the biggest takeaways for me was how privileged and lucky I am. I happened to be born to the right people, in the right family, and be born a straight white male in America. Those factors, combined with my class privilege, has more or less saved me. I landed a job with a family member; I had good connections to help with my networking; I was able to borrow money to live on while I hunted. Don't get me wrong, things were tight and I did everything I could to pinch pennies, but I had a lot of safety nets. I am very thankful for each of them.

The Mix:

1. G-Side "Y U Mad" - I can't say enough good things about this album. Y U Mad doesn't sound like any rap I've ever heard. The song doesn't introduce its beat for its first three minutes. The main instrument is a piano. A fucking piano. The track is enveloped is sparkling synths. There are deep layers of ringing guitars and choirs. The low end is neither thumping nor warm and is a littler quieter than you might expect. Oh yeah, and the rapping is amazing.



2. John Cale "Dying on the Vine" - I have John Cale's 1994 "Seducing Down The Door" double disc collection. Frankly, I liked Dying on the Vine more before I tackled the collection. Dying on the Vine is a great song that Joy Division never wrote. My complaint about Seducing Down The Door is that Cale wears his influences on his sleeve and the odes are so heavy-handed that I often feel like he's borrowing entire riffs or structures. Yeah, I know he's an important and accomplished musical talent and yeah, the Velvet Underground were a good band. I get it. If Seducing Down The Door all sounded like Dying on the Vine, I would be obsessed. Dying on the Vine sounds so vulnerable and personal. It sounds like it was written by a man awakening from a substance-induced haze and reflecting on his underlying unhappiness. There is so much pathos in his voice, so much weariness that I can't help but feel like I'm having a beer with the man in a dim pub while he recounts his slow descent into madness. Again, Seducing Down The Door makes me question the sincerity of the song a bit and wonder if he was just jamming out to Joy Division in the studio or something. Either way, this is a really engaging track and is executed perfectly.



3. Off With Their Heads "Janie" - File under disturbing, obsessive relationship song that made my brain explode. I am a sucker for a rough voice and a good melody and here I am, listening to a recording that would make my producer friends throw up in their mouths. The lyrics are disturbing and the line about him killing himself if his girlfriend leaves him makes me cringe every time.



4. A-Trak "Donnis" - A-Trak's Dirty South remixes are on my must own list, certainly the first one, although the second installment has some gems on it, like this Donnis track. A-Trak's beat is fantastic: dancey and solid with interesting synth work and the right amount of turntable flair for me (the man invented a notation system for turntabling). Donnis' rap is the sort of celebratory, macho bullshit that has now become interchangeable with mainstream hip hop. It's a notch less self-congratulatory than erecting a statute in his own honor. The original Donnis track, "Gone"," has a forgettable beat that doesn't match the enthusiasm of the chorus. A-trak sampled (or mimicked) much of the noticeable instrumentation on the track and produced the song Donnis and his produced never could. This I put the original below for comparison.





5. The Knife "Pass This On" - I didn't "get" the Knife until 2009. One day, I put on Silent Shout and my jaw dropped. Pass This On is from their second album Deep Cuts. Deep Cuts may have more energy than Silent Shout, but it lacks Silent Shout's structural sophistication and beautifully sculpted sounds. Pass This On is a fun and creepy song about coming on to someone's brother.



6. Hour of the Wolf "Faith in Fiction" - I first heard Hour of the Wolf shortly after I graduated from college. I had a decent job, but no semblance of a career and I felt unchallenged, bored, and constricted. I would take long lunch breaks and exercise in the basement gym. I have these bizarrely distinct memories of jumping rope in this shitty yoga studio while listening to Black Blood Transfusion and feeling like it was written specifically for me. I can go on and on about how Hour of the Wolf has chosen excellent guitar tones or how they have an intuitive grasp on their songs' momentum or how their drummer plays drums the way all rock drummers should. I won't say any of that. Instead, I will just use a line that Chuck Klosterman once used to defend his affection for Axl Rose:

I've maintained a decent living by making easy jokes about Axl Rose for the past 10 years, but what's the final truth? The final truth is this: He makes the best songs. They sound the way I want songs to sound.

7. Bruce Springsteen "Downbound Train" - There is a recession on, right? I love the weary bridge in this one and the linear narration of someone's fall from safety and comfort. I remember riding the MARTA in Atlanta and listening to this as I went over my job search in my head. Yeah, it was unnecessarily dramatic, but the song is brilliant regardless of your employment situation.

(sorry, can only find live versions online)



8. Motorhead "I'll Be You Sister" - I know this song is about sex, I just don't know how.



9. Steve Aoki (MSTRKRFT Remix w/ Justice) "D.A.N.C.E." - I am admittedly late in finding this. I like MSTRKFT and have been listening to their remixes for a while. This was under my radar. I love the finger-tapped metal guitar, distorted and twisted into sounding like a oscillating synth. It's like sonic candy to me. I used to hate the vocal sample bridge at the 1:25 point because it's syncopated and seemed to kill the song's momentum, but now I am in awe of how well they come out of that. The music fades in, the guitar line evolves, and a hi-hat roll re-introduces an entirely dead beat. It is ambitious but I think it pays off.



10. Dear Landlord "I Live In Hell" - It was not uncommon for me to listen to this song 3 times a day for a week or so on end. I don't know when I will stop liking pop punk, but it wasn't this year.



11. Lucero "Watch it Burn" - Obligatory Lucero song on the Birthday Mix.



12. The Gaslight Anthem "American Slang" - I have vivid memories of listening to the Gaslight Anthem with my friend Andy my 1L year. I blogged about them that year, but I didn't love the band until the '59 Sound, which is now one of my desert island records. The new album, American Slang, is a solid record that suffers from its proximity to greatness. I know this is an obnoxious sentence, so please excuse me, but the title track reminds me of the first time I went to Paris when I was 21. I only knew two people in the country and barely had enough money to buy food, much less a train ticket back to England in the event something happened. My friend Ann took me around and we hung out with this big and random group of Marines and Embassy workers who were all the same age and all stationed in Paris. The language and cultural barriers pressed these unrelated and very different people into a clique, with dynamic relationships and the sort of romantic yearning you'd expect amongst single 20 somethings living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was refreshing to be such an outsider, to have no relationship with the people I was with or knowledge of the city I was in. There is no single line or lyric in American Slang that sums up that experience for me, but I guess it sort of sounds like how it felt.