Artist	Song
SinTad O'Connor	Molly Malone [Sean-N=s Nua] 3:33
Nick Cave & Kylie Minogue	Where the Wild Roses Grow [Murder Ballads] 3:56
Grateful Dead	Brokedown Palace [American Beauty] 4:06
Van Dyke Parks	Keep Me In Your Heart [Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon] 4:54
Lhasa De Sela	Soon This Space Will Be Too Small [The Living Road] 4:45
The Beatles	Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight [Abbey Road] 3:09
The Beatles	Maxwell's Silver Hammer [Abbey Road] 3:27
Robbie Basho	Khatum [Song of the Stallion] 2:02
Phil Ochs	Cross My Heart [Pleasures of the Harbour] 3:18
They Might Be Giants	Mink Car [Mink Car] 2:12
Moby	Sleep Alone [18] 4:43
They Might Be Giants	It's Not My Birthday [Miscellaneous T] 1:52
Bob Dylan	Man in the Long Black Coat [Oh Mercy] 4:35
Queen	Bohemian Rhapsody [A Night At The Opera] 5:57
Terry Jacks	Seasons in the Sun [Seasons in the Sun] 3:30
They Might Be Giants	Dead [Flood] 2:56
The Beatles	Julia [Anthology 3 Disc 1] 1:35
Neil Young & Crazy Horse	Sleeps With Angels [Sleeps With Angels] 2:47
Pink Floyd	Time [Dark Side Of The Moon] 6:59
Brian Eno	On Some Faraway Beach [Here Come The Warm Jets] 4:42
United Travel Service	Wind & Stone [no album, acquired on Dead Man's mix Vanished in the Haze] 3:20

Comment:

Everybody sing: "GIVEN THE CHANCE I'LL DIE LIKE A BABY / ON SOME FARAWAY BEACH WHEN THE SEASON'S OVER / UNLIKELY I'LL BE REMEMBERED / AS THE TIDE BRUSHES SAND IN MY EYES I'LL DRIP AWAY / CAST UP ON A PLATEAU WITH ONLY ONE MEMORY / A SINGLE SYLLABLE, OH LI LO LI LO / LI LEE LI LEE LI LEE LEE LI LEE LI LEE LO..." Brian Eno's line "Given the Chance, I'll Die Like a Baby", bursting through a steadily building funky-bizarro groove after two and a half minutes of "On Some Faraway Beach" instrumental, gets my vote as the greatest opening line ever to a song. Since I was a child I was always terrified of death, more consciously or less; and often through my life, I now realize, I've also had the fear that if I didn't perform extraordinarily well in circumstances I might not have even realized were a test, I would suffer a quick death, literally or metaphorically.My original version of the "Given a Chance, I'll Die Like a Baby" mix suffered, I think, from an overly literal interpretation of my chosen theme: "If you aren't careful, you might die"; and so therefore I jettisoned half the tracks (including an inferior, mp3 version of "On Some Faraway Beach") and mixed up the others, sans the opener and closer which remain, with ten new pieces to create this version. My sense is that my replacement tracks (3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19) fit the theme on a more intuitive rather than intellectual level, with the result that the mix should flow better and doesn't suffer from too many ideas bumping around in it. However sad I am to see "Eulogy to Lenny Bruce" and "Country Fair" go, I ended up concluding they were rather oblique for this mix and replaced them with the likes of "Time" and "Sleeps With Angels", which should make their point quite directly indeed.Two of the new, streamlining tracks are instrumentals: "Khatum", meaning "end", is referred to by its performer/composer Robbie Basho as a Closing Prayer to its album, Song of the Stallion; Basho's overall darkness suffuses it enough to welcome its interpretation as a death meditation. "Keep Me In Your Heart" is a high abstractification of inevitable death, being Van Dyke Parks's background string quartet arrangement behind Warren Zevon associate Jorge Calder=n's respect-drenched cover of the last song on Zevon's final album The Wind, created while Zevon knew his own death was imminent.This mix is now, I think, somewhat more Buddhistically-accepting of death, which I rather like; and even the closing, obscure 60's psychedelic-protopunk single "Wind & Stone" (main lyric: "The wind in the forest does far more for me / Than your plastic society"; thanks again, Dead Man) acts more like a sigh and meditative surrender than something to counteract previous building morbidity.I'm keeping the other one up, because it really is a rather different mix from this at this point; but I'd say this one definitely fits the original "Given the Chance, I'll Die Like a Baby" concept much more nicely. Special note: "Time" and "On Some Faraway Beach" are edited so that they flow into each other smoothly, overlapping for about five seconds. Maybe these two prog-most tracks of this mix can together acquire the grandeur of the displaced penultimate (great track, but no room) "Karn Evil 9, Third Impression" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer; on the other hand, "Wind & Stone", with its new connotations shining, barely needs to combat ELP-style pompousness (with all its garagey nature), like it did before.So... onward![Comments slightly revised 1/10/05]

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