summer mixtape.

Prompted by the fact that I never update my iPod anymore, and also by my obsessive love of summer playlists, here is a short but sweet compilation of albums by bands I have been listening to for a depressing amount of time (more than ten years, to be precise) and who, as such, remind me of my own horrible mortality.

The Strokes--Room on Fire

Even though I've been listening to this record fairly consistently since it came out ten years ago, it really reminds me most of my first summer in Kingston back in 2009. I think I put Reptilia and The End Has No End on every mix I made that summer. Arriving in Kingston I felt freer and younger than I'd felt in years. That August I drove out to Almonte along the gorgeous back roads of Frontenac County, on my way to my best friend's wedding, listening to the Strokes and Plaskett on repeat. I felt like I'd finally figured out where I belonged.




Weezer--the Blue Album

I know I reference Weezer and kissing boys a LOT, and I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but look: If I'd had a baby with the first dude I kissed while listening to this album, that baby would now be nearly finished college and asking if it could move back in for just a few more months while it got its independent coffee shop/performance space up and running (my imaginary babies are INCREDIBLY creative and intellectual).



Thrush Hermit

I've loved Thrush Hermit ever since they did the theme song for Street Cents on CBC back in the early 90s (I have been a public broadcasting nerd for a long, long time). I found a used copy of Smart Bomb at Dr. Disc when I was 13 or 14 and listened to it all the damned time. I couldn't get over their clever, poetic lyrics, the wordy jokes they made; I'd found my nerd-rock gods. A little while later, my best friend made me a series of amazing mixtapes to listen to on a family trip out west, and she put The Great Pacific Ocean on one of them. I rewound it and listened to it over and over again. We had a complicated, overwrought, intense friendship, and I missed her like crazy while I was on the other side of the country. Listening to that song I felt my heart leap and sink and break and mend a thousand times.




Elliott Smith--Figure 8

Here's a fun story about this record: I bought the CD at Chapters on Bloor Street in Toronto, during my second year at Trinity. The dude who worked in the music department there was really cute and nice, and he seemed pleasantly surprised to be helping someone find an Elliott Smith album rather than something operatic or otherwise Yorkvillian. "Are you a Nick Drake fan?" he asked me, and I admitted that I had never heard of him. "He's an amazing singer songwriter who killed himself before he really got recognized," he told me, and found me a copy of Way To Blue: An Introduction To Nick Drake, which, naturally, I bought. I stopped by my boyfriend's residence room on my way back to St. Hilda's to show him my purchases. "You didn't know who NICK DRAKE was?" he asked incredulously. "Well, did YOU?" I countered. Of course, he did. He then got really sore about the fact that a cute boy had prompted me to buy a record and we got in a fight. A year later, we were both in a Canadian Literature class and there was this British guy in the class who looked and sounded EXACTLY like Nick Drake, and when I pointed it out to him, my boyfriend declared me a genius. It was one of a handful of running jokes that somehow carried us through an ill-advised year of sharing an apartment. A year or two after that, Elliott Smith killed himself, and I wondered if I had somehow made it happen by buying his album at the same time as another misunderstood suicidal genius.



Belle and Sebastian--Lazy Line Painter Jane

The same boyfriend put this on a mix tape for me once. During our first summer, both of us lived back in our hometowns, and we'd take turns hopping on the train from Hamilton to Oshawa to visit each other. One Friday night he picked me up in the dark at the Oshawa GO Station, and blared this song on the drive back to his parents' place. It was dark out, and chilly for a June night. I'd heard Belle and Sebastian plenty of times before, but never this song. The sound of it made me want to lean against him, burrow down, nod my head till I nodded off. But we weren't that close yet, or maybe we just weren't that honest yet. So I just told him, "I really love this song." It was a time when it was easier to tell him I loved a song than that I loved him. "I figured you would," he replied. "It's on the tape I made you."