Artist	Song
James Baskett	Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
Queen	Don't Stop Me Now
Billy Joel	Tell Her About it
Sly and the Family Stone	Dance to the Music
Olivia Newton-John	Let Me Be There
Canned Heat	Going Up the Country
Harry Nilsson	Everything's Got 'Em
The Lettermen	Put Your Head on My Shoulders
Johnny Mathis	Chances are
Carole King	Been to Canaan
John Denver	Leaving on a Jet Plane
Barry Manilow	Mandy
Elton John	Rocket Man
Seals & Crofts	We May Never Pass This Way Again
Jim Croce	Operator
America	Sister Golden Hair
England Dan & John Ford Coley	Nights are Forever Without You
Simon & Garfunkel	The Sound of Silence
Loggins & Messina	House at Pooh Corner
Fleetwood Mac	Go Your Own Way
Don McLean	American Pie

Comment:

My mom's birthday was today and since she doesn't like actual presents anymore (claiming that she has way too much stuff, which is quite accurate), I have to find alternate directions, and since I'm somewhat music savvy, I came up with the idea of making mixes of her record collection. She loves music but doesn't follow it anymore, so her interests have stayed in the past, and she doesn't have convenient ways to listen to it, since she stopped buying albums back in the era of cassette tapes. So I pilfered through the stack of records she's kept ever since her twenties and used what she's told me over the years about her tastes as well as intuition and in some cases even asterisks that she placed next to her preferred songs on the back of some recored cases to put this and a few other mixes together. Ultimately I went overboard, though, when she said she saw an infomercial for one of those Time-Life 10-CD compilations on TV one night and loved almost everything on it (it was a Soft Rock theme, of course), so, fearing that my concoction would be insufficient, I went ahead and downloaded every song from all those damn CDs and recreated them myself (without the aesthetic value of the CD packaging, though, since I'm sadly no good at that). That was probably a bit much, I think, but I always try to overcompensate where gifts are concerned because I can never think of good enough ones on my own. Hence, quantity over quality. Very dumb but I'm limited, what can I say.

Anyway, so this is the first and more or less best volume of the CDs I compiled myself, in that it contains the most songs that i personally can enjoy, not that it matters. Because she's so smitten with soft rock, there's an abundance of dreary, slow-paced melodrama to work through, so I made this as the first disc to lighten the tone a little bit. One thing I liked about making these wasn't necessarily the chance to explore a new kind of music (because frankly soft rock can be pretty awful), but to re-explore a lot of the sounds I grew up with, thanks to my mom. There were a lot of songs on these mixes, and on the Time-Warner-Life-Whatever comps that I'd heard a million times before but never knew the names of, and while in many cases it was just a matter of "oh so THAT'S that fucking song I hate", there were some pleasing revelations, such as on this disc alone: America's "Sister Golden Hair" and Olivia Newton-John's "Let Me Be There" (I know it's cheesy, but it's nice 'n' catchy pop music, dammit). Then there's that Canned Heat song...oh man, my God. I haven't heard that one in a long time, and didn't think about it until now, but that must be one of the most unbearably awful crimes against humanity that we've ever experienced. It starts out appealingly, with a folksy vibe, and then that voice comes in...I think it has the power to drive men mad, simply bonkers. I started laughing almost immediately when I heard it even though my mind was reeling in sheer terror from the shittiness of his singing. It's insane.

I hope she likes these. Every single track is taken directly from her records, from the era when she was as plugged into her love of music as I myself am currently, so maybe at least she'll appreciate the connection there. I don't really know what that means but it sounds kinda sweet.

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