Summer Mixtape #4: Never Be Blue Days (Torn + Frayed Vol. 1)

Oh, how I love this mixtape.

The record shows quite clearly that Never Be Blue Days is a mixtape delivered in the middle of winter. Jay Thompson sent it to me in December 2012, a peaceful time in my life that landed right in the midst of some violent external events in my neighborhood and job that would reshape my family’s life in ways that seem retrospectively rather giant. But December in New Orleans, and especially in the dead-quiet-but-weirdly-urban neighborhood of Algiers Point, can feel like summer did in the places I come from, so perhaps I immediately formed an association between this music and the feeling of summer.

But while I loved this mixtape immediately, it wasn’t until 2018-19 that I formed a truly deep bond with it — and its by then three sequels, which I’ll share in sequence. (By the way, this is something I love about an ongoing exchange that goes on for years, then decades: time becomes irrelevant in some important way; a sequel can feel like a prequel; a starting point can wind up feeling like an ending; even while I know the exact chronology and affiliated associations with living.) (I love punctuation and know that I used those semi-colons inappropriately. Sorry.) Anyway, the summers of 2018 and 2019 were the first that my family and I spent primarily in the Pocumtuck Valley, which is a valley-within-a-valley to the larger and more well-known Pioneer Valley.

What I learned by mostly staying home those summers is that there is a feeling to rural/agricultural life in hilly/mountainous areas not too distant from the sea and major cities that joins the place of my (and Jay’s) childhood to the place of my adulthood (alright: my middle age) in spite of 3000 miles distance stretching between them. And this mixtape, made by a person who grew up in northern Snohomish County just like I did, captures something essential about that place in the summertime — something that I recognize clearly in the rhythms of summer in this place in summertime.

Well, so what? So what! That’s what. A mixtape can join parts of a life in a way that any piece of art can. I may not be looking especially for narrative coherence among parts of my life, but I’m not not looking for them, and the spatial ones that seem outside of time are more interesting than those rooted in coincidence and circumstance.

Jay did some writing and thinking about his dad last week that I found interesting and worth thinking about. This mixtape seems to me to come from a wide variety of sources in Jay’s life, all of them recognizable to me — one of those sources is his dad’s music. That is a strand that runs through all the volumes of this series, and while I can never decide definitively whether I like the strand that comes from Jay’s dad or Jay’s mom better, doing so is like deciding between peach pie and strawberry-rhubarb pie.

There are different contexts in which I consider one or another of the mixtapes Jay has given me to be my favorite — for instance, there’s one that is my favorite to hold in memory with Melissa, another which is a favorite of my children’s, a few that capture genres precisely, etc. This is my favorite of the mixtapes that helped me understand my own life with greater humility. I had a pretty high opinion of myself for a long time. Jay’s been such a resource for finding my way to a better-calibrated version of myself. It’s hard to explain, but my relationship to this mixtape had a lot to do with that.

On an overall list of the 150 or so mixtapes Jay has made for me, I would place this one at #2. Hope you enjoy it even without all the personal associations it has for me. At the very least, get to the end: the final two songs are just about as perfect an ending as you could give to a summertime mixtape.

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Tracklist or Never Be Blue Days, the first in a sequence of mixtapes retroactively titled “Torn + Frayed” by Jay Thompson, sent to my household in December 2012.

“Side A”

1. Langhorne Slim, Back to the Wild — from the album Be Set Free (2009)

2. Buddy Holly & The Crickets, Heartbeat — from the album The Buddy Holly Story (1959)

3. Great Lake Swimmers, Backstage With the Modern Dancers — from the album Ongiara (2007)

4. Paul Westerberg, First Glimmer — from the album 14 Songs (1993)

5. Tom Waits, Blind Love — from the album Rain Dogs (1985)

6. Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Mais Quand Tu Danses — from the album French Record (1980)

7. The Swan Silvertones, How I Got Over — from the album The Swan Silvertones (1959)

Intermission

9. Mercedes Sosa, Sole le Pido a Dios — from the compilation Songs - Festival Des Politischen LIedes - International Kunstler - Live (2009)

10. Lefty Frizzell, I Love You a Thousand Ways — from the album The One and Only Lefty Frizzell (1959)

11. Randy Newman, Birmingham — from the album Good Old Boys (1974)

12. Traveling Wilburys, Last Night — from the album The Traveling Wilburys (1989)

13. Carroll Thompson, Sing Me a Love Song — from the album Hopelessly In Love (1981)

14. Stills-Young Band, Long May You Run — from the album Long May You Run (1976)

15. Chuck Berry, Promised Land — from the album St. Louis to Liverpool (1964)