Sunday Mixtape #11: I Think I Need a Little Poison

Here is the track list for 26 Reformations of a Middle Class American Heart, Vol. 2: I Think I Need a Little Poison, which I completed for Jay Thompson on the first Friday in April 2022 and mailed in April of that year.

Side A:

1. Julie Doiron, Can’t Make It No More (2:29)

2. Johnny Thunders, You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory (2:53)

3. Throwing Muses, Bright Yellow Gun (3:44)

4. Mark Lanegan Band, Drunk On Destruction (3:25)

5. Jonny Telafone, Can We Pretend a Little Longer (2:25)

6. The National, Bloodbuzz, Ohio (4:36)

7. Marianne Faithfull, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan (4:14)

8. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Breathless (3:14)

9. Big Thief, Shoulders (3:13)

10. Car Seat Headrest, Something Soon (4:20)

11. Nadine Shah, Bobby Heron (3:39)

12. Benjamin Clementine, Gone (4:33)

13. Iggy Pop, I Want to Go to the Beach (2:53)

Side B:

1. Christopher Owens, Selfish Feelings (2:48)

2. Butch Willis & The Rocks, The TV’s From Outer Space (2:50)

3. Jennifer Gentle, I Do Dream You (2:24)

4. Luna, Slash Your Tires (4:46)

5. Comet Gain, Bad Nite at the Mustache (5:30)

6. The Raveonettes, Free to Walk (3:02)

7. Mitski, Your Best American Girl (3:34)

8. Orville Peck, Dead of Night (3:59)

9. Alex Turner, Glass in the Park (4:00)

10. Lawrence Arabia, The Listening Times (3:11)

11. Bishi, Ship of Fools (3:45)

12. Cat’s Eyes, The Duke of Burgundy (2:19)

13. Jessica Pratt, This Time Around (3:37)

---

This is a mix for the middle of life — for the hard times that accompany being all the things our culture asks ordinary people to be in the middle of their lives. All the songs on the first side in particular are dark and difficult in their themes, and the second side isn’t a whole lot lighter (though it is, a little). I think of it as music that captures some of the feelings of being a parent, some of the feelings of being a worker, some of the feelings of being an emotionally unfinished/incomplete human, some of the feelings of despair at one’s finer ambitions sliding closer to out of reach, some of the feelings of hope that well up anyway. 

I made the first three volumes of this series all at once on an evening when Melissa was out with friends, I was exhausted but didn’t want to give up on being awake, and the kids for some reason went to sleep early. I sat in a chair in the living room of our apartment attached to a dormitory and organized these three mixes on the principle that they had to each be finished in the ninety minutes it would take to play them — I hadn’t made one of these mixes in fourteen years by that time, and I knew if I didn’t get at least one done quickly it might be another year or two before I managed it — that’s the time constraint of this phase of life. The middle ninety of those two hundred seventy minutes picked up on some of the challenges in the first ninety minutes and doubled down on their presence. 

Most of the songs on this mix came to my attention via radio shows. During the long period of my kids’ early childhood when I was either taking care of their needs or those of the teenagers I work for at all times and taking care of myself and my own interests basically not at all, I didn’t have time to listen to albums but occasionally I would remember to turn on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday afternoon radio show from England or any show that happened to be on at KEXP in Seattle. I did that frequently enough that I pulled aside several hundred songs I liked from those years. Then I got so busy that I forgot about those hundreds of songs entirely for a few years. Discovering them again was the catalyst for setting forth once again into the waters of the 26 song, two side, 90-minute mixtape. 

I’m glad that, somehow or another, I managed to listen to some hours of radio in those years of difficulty. That’s all I really have to say about this mix.