Artist	Song	Buy
Nobuo Uematsu	Aeris' Theme
from Final Fantasy VII: Original Soundtrack (1997) 4:12
Dean Martin	Mambo Italiano
from Single release (1955) 2:19
They Might Be Giants	The Statue Got Me High
from Apollo 18 (1992) 3:05
Orfeón Donostiarra & Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, cond. Michel Plasson	Dies Irae
from Verdi - Messa Da Requiem (1997) 2:16
Patti LuPone & Howard McGillin	You're The Top
from Anything Goes: New Broadway Cast Recording (1987) 4:10
Splender	Yeah, Whatever
from Halfway Down The Sky (1999) 3:44
abangaku	Poligeai
1:59
Kenneth Branagh, Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Silverstone, Natascha McElhone, Matthew Lillard, Adrian Lester, Emily Mortimer & Carmen Ejogo	Let's Face The Music And Dance
from Love's Labour's Lost: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2000) 2:22
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Herbert von Karajan	Overture
from Mozart - Le Nozze Di Figaro (1979) 3:50
The Flaming Lips	Fight Test
from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (2002) 4:09
Michael York	Dreamland
from The Poetry Of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume Two (1996) 2:54
Utah Saints	Theme From Mortal Kombat
from Mortal Kombat: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1995) 2:58
Emerson, Lake & Palmer	Still . . . . You Turn Me On
from Brain Salad Surgery (1973) 2:53
Paul Robeson	Ol' Man River
from Songs Of Free Men (1997) Not totally sure about the release date, but recorded live in 1947. 3:08
ABBA	Dancing Queen
from Arrival (1976) 3:52
Bob Dylan	Chimes Of Freedom
from Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964) 7:09
Michael Crawford & Sarah Brightman	The Phantom Of The Opera
from The Very Best Of Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Broadway Collection (1996) 4:19
The Crew Cuts	Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream)
from Single release (1954) 2:47
Sena Jurinac & Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Herbert von Karajan	Voi Che Sapete
from Mozart - Le Nozze Di Figaro (1979) 2:39
They Might Be Giants	See The Constellation
from Apollo 18 (1992) 3:27
Don McLean	American Pie
from American Pie (1971) 8:36

Comment:

Thirteen years in the making (give or take), The Wild Cathedral Evening actually reaches back even further than 2007: it’s a mix composed mostly of music I appreciated during my senior year of high school and the summer after, 1999-2000. Many of the tracks here aren’t the versions I heard then — in fact, many of the versions I heard then were live performances, rather than recordings — but I’ve been collecting them over the years to arrive at what I’m hoping is a proper nostalgic vision.

My title, a line from “Chimes Of Freedom”, I think is worth some talking about. A math-oriented introvert for most of my school years, I suddenly, in twelfth grade, remade myself into something that fit much better into my school’s ideals at large: a creative, social artist and art-appreciator. What did I discover, that year? I discovered exactly this: the Wild, the Cathedral, and the Evening. “Holiness” was suddenly a big thing for me at that time — despite my belonging to no religion, a combination I might be suspicious of now, but back then, it was liberating. And the spirit I thought I was in touch with was achieved, at least in my mind, most reliably through evening wildness.

There was clearly a lot of musical theater in my life back then, and even a bit of opera: a classically trained Swiss soprano attended my school that year, and sang the Mozart aria “Voi Che Sapete” to great effect during our performance of Beaumarchais’ original Marriage of Figaro play (translated from the French), which also opened with a string quartet of students playing the opera’s overture. But, twelfth grade also presaged my growing focus on rock: I first heard They Might Be Giants’ album Apollo 18 on the day before Thanksgiving, 1999, and it became the soundtrack to all my evening mysteries. “They Might Be Giants are gods,” I would state, in awe. On a college visit, too, a fellow prospective student played me “Yeah, Whatever”; it revved me up in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible.

The two songs here that I didn’t hear that year were “Fight Test”, which wasn’t even released until 2002, and “Still . . . . You Turn Me On”. I added them both to this mix thinking that they fit pretty well mood-wise, despite the lyrics that referred to romantic relationships, which I certainly didn’t want anything to do with back then, despite certain longings. “Still . . . . You Turn Me On”, when I first heard it, sounded like a love song a video game character would sing; since video games were still an important part of my senior-year thoughts, it was in.

Lastly, it probably bears some explaining why I’ve chosen to include a track performed by myself. My friend Max’s poem “Poligeai”, which he wrote in the poetry class we were both in, obsessed me throughout the end of senior year and into the following summer, when I remember chanting it in rhapsody among the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of gemstones. Not surprisingly, no recording of “Poligeai” existed, so when I first envisioned this mix, I recorded one myself, triple-tracking my voice, accompanied by a combination of my own drumming and an Apple GarageBand rhythm. I think it fits in nicely...!

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