Artist	Song
Daphne Loves Derby	Cue the Sun!
Noah and the Whale	Rocks & Daggers
Tilly and the Wall	Beat Control
The Pink Spiders	Gimme Chemicals
ELO	So Serious
The Lightning Seeds	The Life of Riley
LCD Soundsystem	All My Friends
Pete and the Pirates	Mr. Understanding
Adam Green	Twee Twee Dee
Camera Obscura	Teenager
Vampire Weekend	Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
The Icicles	Forever and a Day
Steve Poltz	Brief History of My Life
Saint Etienne	Former Lover
Sahara Hotnights	The Loneliest City of All
The Format	Inches and Falling (I Love Love)
Puffy AmiYumi	Love So Pure
The Explorers Club	Do You Love Me?
The Breakup Society	He Wants His World Back (Baby)
Hot Chip	In the Privacy of Our Love
The Octopus Project	I Saw the Bright Shinies
Peter and the Wolf	Check Out the River
Los Campesinos!	Death to Los Campesinos
The Boy Least Likely to	A Balloon on a Broken String
The Ramones	Questioningly
The Jesus & Mary Chain	God Help Me
Akron/Family	Ed is a Portal
Bob Marley	Three Little Birds

Comment:

Well, once again I'm on the road to transcendence. The songs here are a blur of the exuberant, the meditative, the wistful, the sublime, and the joyous. Reveling in these moods always makes me see everything in profound shades, so pardon my pretension. Although these are the heaviest songs in my current rotation, I was inspired to make this by - don't laugh - the book "Stargirl" by Jerry Spinelli. A younger friend of mine strongly insisted that I read it, being his favorite book, because he wants to try filming an adaptation and was hoping to enlist my help. It's a bit maddeningly simplistic throughout, but the ideas are potent. I feel like I've reviewed my entire life 50 different ways since I started reading it. It made me think about how we take the world for granted, how the structure of society carves our individuality down into homogenized packages (not a new insight, but one we do overlook), distracting us with our needs for acceptance and away from honest expression and free exploration of the infinite possibilities out there. Okay, I know that sounds like the middle school essay thesis of a total wanker, but I'm a weak writer; don't blame the theme. Point is, this mix is my ode to life. All my mixes can and should be described that way, actually. I shirked the usual effort to unify styles too much (not that my mixes are ever altogether cohesive); warts and all, this is the sound of Mike for the past couple months. "Three Little Birds" is a far older friend, of course, but I've been enjoying a Marley revival since buying "Legend", and I couldn't make a mix fueled by such existential musings without including the beautiful simplicity of his wisdom.

Even though the majority of people, at least those I associate with as well as my fellow AOTM members, have a preference for more serious, artful, or otherwise definitively mature and bleak sounds, or at the very least share an unspoken derision towards unapologetic pop (cue everyone telling me how wrong that blanket statement is), I've always gravitated towards that happy music, the kind that even makes the walk from your house to your car in the afternoon somehow feel brighter, and why not? Does it make me shallow, or does it show a healthier connection with the commonly regarded finding-happiness meaning of life? I love sad songs and aggressive rock music and most genres in-between, but at the end of the day, give me something that makes me smile, laugh, or swoon in ecstasy. I realize it seems impossible with the world in grim turmoil and a trillion different internal woes pulling us apart at the seams, and certainly I'm no poster boy for positivity (however much I feel it inside, I'm never comfortable expressing it, so most people see me only as the quiet or sarcastic type), but that radiance and that gratitude, that ability to take joy in anything, that's what life should be about, that's how our hearts should sing.

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