Recently in Friday Mixtape Category

The appeal of country music, for a sissified city slicker such as myself, largely lies in glimpsing a universe in which everyone is tougher, stronger, surlier, drunker and more adept with power tools than I am, which is not a terribly high bar, no, but it's nonetheless simultaneously dismaying and thrilling how many women can clear it. Here then we have Miranda, Taylor, Neko, Ashton, Carrie, Those Darlins and many others boozing, seething and raging, to my delight/terror. Yes, even the one named "Sunny."

Listen now: Friday Mixtape: Country Chicks Who Could Beat Me Up

Metal has been around for more than 40 years (or at the very least, since Black Sabbath's original lineup got together the first time), and by now it's hauling around its own canon of what are generally assumed to be classic, world-shaking albums—some of which are every bit as great as people claim, others of which (as with any other genre) aren't.

But this mixtape isn't about those. Nope—these are bands you probably never even heard about, or (if you did) forgot about, or maybe you heard their names and wondered about them but most likely never got around to checking them out, or (in the case of the more familiar names) maybe they started out way more metal than you ever figured. Or at least more "heavy rock"—once upon a time, the two genres were synonyms. That would've been back in the '70s, which takes up a healthy chunk of this playlist. Thought there's plenty from the '80s, too—especially the first third or so of that decade, when thrash and hair metal hadn't quite fully gelled yet, and lots of bands were somehow unknowingly predating both at the same time, all while the New Wave of British (though also often Non-British) Metal was somewhere between a rumor, a mystery and a myth.

To keep things current, this playlist does eventually wind its way into the '90s and '00s, but that stuff's kept to a minimum, since it really hasn't been around long enough to get lost in the dustbin of history quite yet. Whatever. These 50 songs rock your socks off at the school of hard knocks, as Black N Blue used to say. A few are even about eating the rich—or about anarchy, the police, war heroes and stuff. (Occupying Metal, if you will!) Two are shrieked in sexy romance languages; another (by Krokus) concerns a long stick going boom. Plus, five artists —Vandenberg, Heavy Metal Kids, Wild Dogs, Axe and Pat Travers—chronicle what's happening out on the street, or at least claim to in their song titles. And what is happening out there? A knock-down, drag-out rock 'n' roll party, of course! So what are you waiting for?

Click here to hear my Friday Mixtape: Metal That Fell Through the Cracks playlist.

Sometimes my hipper-than-thou friends make fun of me for liking country music. To them, it's all just ignorant cowboy jams sung by toothless ol' fellas in a hat. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, it's heartless, slick, countrified pop sung by über-tanned hotties with hair too perfect to even bother with a hat.

And while both of those impressions are somewhat grounded in real-life examples, there's a world of amazing music that falls somewhere in between — if you're not too jaded to hear it. The problem is, you need to be super-enlightened to realize you are a jaded, close-minded mofo. I find trickery and deception are especially helpful in situations like these.

This playlist features songs whose overall reach extends beyond genres. Maybe the lyrics touch on experiences that are so well expressed, they become universal. Or maybe there's a familiar guitar riff or dirty Hammond organ sound that recalls a classic rock great. And others, with their stripped-down sound and sweet harmonies, may recall some great singer-songwriter from the '70s. And yes, all this sonic goodness comes from artists who happily call themselves country.

I tried to restrict the song choices to albums that have been released in the past couple years. Maybe I will do a sequel that features older songs. But in any case, it's all here, if you're willing to let your country freak flag fly.

Click here to enjoy the whole playlist: Friday Mixtape: Country for Country Haters

When 2Pac rapped, "Every n*gg* in L.A. got a little bit of thug in him," he could have been talking about the hip-hop nation. Whether it's "conscious" fans who love Nas and Slum Village; indie kids who get off to Tyler, the Creator and Three 6 Mafia; or old-school heads who still bump Black Moon and Mobb Deep, every corner of hip-hop fandom harbors the thuggish, ruggish and just plain ignorant. I'm no different. One of my favorite things to do is drive around in my car and blast gangsta rap at high volume. Sometimes it's the beats that kill, but just as often it's the lyrics. I've never slanged keys or participated in a drive-by — or shot anyone at all, for that matter — but I can't deny that I get a rush from banging Wiz Khalifa's "Who I Am" (as in "When you see me in the club/ B*tch you know who I am) or YC's "Racks," featuring lyrics like "Strapped up/ No bodyguards." I'm not really, uh, strapped up, but I don't have a bodyguard, either. Shawty wanna ride with me?

Listen now: Friday Mixtape: Ego Trip

Devoted readers of The Mix (hi, mom!) might remember that my last Friday Mixtape was called Piano Jamz, and consisted of jams featuring pianos. That playlist was kind of a happy accident: by simply culling together a bunch of songs I dug that featured one or more of those 88 keys, I managed to crisscross a whole slew of genres, eras, sounds, etc. It was a neat exercise, and so I've tried again, this time with horns. The brass in these jams is all over the place -- it's featured front and center, during solos, and is occasionally so cleverly deployed you won't even recognize it as brass at all (dig experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson's mind-bending "Judges," which is one guy, one horn, and no effects or loops (seriously)). Stylistically, we range from classic brawny rock to excitable indie rock to orchestral trip-hop to hip-hop to, of course, jazz. No Horn Jamz playlist would be complete without Gerry Raferty and Chuck Mangione, and for those who didn't know Biggie sampled it, be sure to check out Herb Alpert's "Rise." Finally, having come of age in the '90s Orange County ska revival scene, I had to throw in some No Doubt and Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Here's to stuff that blows.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: Horn Jamz

LateNightTales is a mixtape series that "invites the world's best artists to delve deep into their music collections to create the ultimate 'late night' selection." MGMT, Midlake, Belle & Sebastian, Snow Patrol, Jamiroquai, The Cinematic Orchestra and others have curated their own LateNightTales, featuring their favorite nocturnal aural pleasures. These compilations not only reveal the curators' influences, but also offer a wide range of candlelit gems with which to soothe and seduce.

It's a great series (definitely check out the latest one by MGMT), so I thought I'd create my own Late Night Tales mixtape. I'm often drawn to music primed for late nights anyway — tunes slick with midnight-oil mystique and back-alley grime; tracks fueled by booze, narcotics and self-pity; and songs that are darkly detached, desolate and sometimes downright depressing. For me, this means the sexy devilishness of trip-hop (Massive Attack, Tricky), the grandiose moping of post-punk (The Cure, Joy Division), the machinest grit of industrial (Suicide, Nine Inch Nails), the cinematic melancholy of post-rock (Sigur Ros, Mogwai), and some of the darkest singer-songwriter mire known to man (Cat Power, Johnny Cash). This is the kind of stuff the sun could never handle.

Click here to listen to my Friday Mixtape: Late Night Tales.

To the uninitiated, Nashville means one thing: country music. They imagine a town filled with honkytonks and cowboy boot-wearing, pickup-drivin' good old boys. You can certainly find those things, mostly down on Lower Broadway where the tourists tend to hang. Venture a few blocks in any direction, though, and you'll discover that country makes up just a small part of the thriving Nashville music scene.

Maybe it's the collaborative, creative vibe that permeates our quaint neighborhoods or the relatively low cost of living or the small-town feel in a big city that draws them. Whatever the reason, Nashville has attracted some high-profile transplants that include Jack White, whose post-White Stripes life finds him settled in the suburbs while his Third Man Records has taken up residence in a gritty part of downtown reminiscent of his native Detroit. He continues to collaborate here, recording in a home studio on the outskirts of town.

Ben Folds also calls Nashville home, and the Sing-off judge is a fixture at local coffeeshops in the Belmont and 12 South neighborhoods. Michelle Branch, the Black Keys and Keb' Mo' are among the other artists who've left behind their hometowns to resettle in Nashville, while Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow and other big names have set up second homes here.

Singing and a deep, analytic appreciation for it has always been a part of my life. The child of two music teachers, I grew up singing in choirs, taking voice lessons and participating in super-nerdy, incredibly embarrassing, overly harmonized family sing-alongs (Seriously. When my extended family is around, even "Happy Birthday" is usually done in about 12-part harmony). When I went to college, I tried to avoid my destiny for a while but I ended up getting a degree in voice performance anyway. Which is a ridiculously useless degree if you don't want to be an opera singer or, you know, a performer at all, which I quickly discovered I didn't. Nowadays, my own personal vocal performances are pretty much limited to the shower and the occasional drunken karaoke turn. But as a music critic, what I've done with all that singing is channel it into a deep, analytical appreciation for singers.

Now, I don't need a singer to be able to actually sing well to enjoy their music. Some of the best songs in pop history have been made by artists with thin, small and even pitchy voices (with help from a LOT of Auto-Tune). But there is undoubtedly something to be said for an attention to tone, a carefully crafted vocal line, an impressive range, a distinctive timbre -- in other words, a knock-your-socks-off, make-your-teeth-sweat, change-your-life set of pipes. And that's what my Friday Mixtape is dedicated to: an assortment of vocalists from a wide range of genres who have almost nothing in common other than the fact that their voices have knocked me off my feet for one reason or another. Some of the artists on this playlist are here because of the sheer power of their pipes. But even the stone-cold belters, like Aretha and Adele, on this list kill it with such delicate, thoughtful nuance. For the most part, this playlist is really a collection of singers with distinctive voices who think about the way their vocals interact with the narrative and texture of the song: the mournful, powerful wail of ranchera legend Chavela Vargas; Otis Redding's sensual, scratched-up buzz; Nina Simone's weary, gut-punching, inimitable croon; Brandi Carlile's full-out vocal assault. In other words, this is a playlist with singers with a deep, analytical appreciation for the art of singing.

Friday Mixtape: Shiver-Inducing Singers

I've made a personalized mixtape every month for the last five years, combining au courant new hits, old favorites, random stuff overheard in convenience stores, Songs of Personal Emotional Relevance (the one from August 2008 mostly involves my wedding, which explains, for example, "Billie Jean"), ambient stuff that relaxes me in airports (very popular genre), etc. etc. As an example, I thought I'd share the January 2008 volume, which I think hangs together pretty well, considering.

Very brief notes: So we've got hot new indie-rock stuff (Vampire Weekend, the Juno-ascendant Kimya Dawson), recent events I was woefully late on (Franz Ferdinand's LCD Soundsystem cover, plus J. Holiday's luxurious "Bed," a/k/a the greatest song of all time), a track from the There Will Be Blood soundtrack done by a dude from Radiohead, actual Radiohead (was still absorbing In Rainbows, you see), reliable favorites ("Love Is the Drug," Electric Six), a highlight from the crazy Mars Volta concert I went to (they played for, like, eight hours), Marvin Gaye complaining about attorney fees, Youssou N'Dour singing sweetly, Lez (well, Led, but this'll do) Zeppelin wailing uncouthly, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk wailing even more uncouthly. Plus Alicia Keys' "Like You'll Never See Me Again," because she played it on Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve or whatever right after the ball dropped, and I dug it a lot. If you only have time for one song here, though, by god make it Swamp Dogg's version of John Prine's "Sam Stone," which is incredible, and plus his name is Swamp Dogg. Nothing here was airport-affiliated, oddly enough. But don't hold that against them.

Friday Mixtape: My Own Personal January 2008

I'm off to Poland in a couple of weeks for Unsound, an annual festival of electronic and experimental music. This year, my itinerary involves not just a flight from Berlin to Krakow but also, apparently, some kind of time machine: the festival's 2011 edition is being billed as Unsound 1970. (That's the year before I was born; hopefully it won't cause me any problems at the bar.) Behind the temporal slippage lies this year's theme: "Future Shock," a phrase borrowed from Alvin Toffler's 41-year-old treatise on technology, social change and information overload.

The topic is timely for at least two reasons. Toffler's description of future shock as "the sickness that comes from too much change in too short a period of time" remains applicable to much of our contemporary malaise, from the Tea Party to the Euro zone. The concept also applies to broad swathes of contemporary music, as artists and listeners alike grapple with unprecedented access to the history of recorded music.

As Simon Reynolds explores in his recent book Retromania, popular music is addicted to the past as never before. This is particularly true in electronic music, from the '90s stylings of so much contemporary house and techno to the muddled memory-beat of chillwave, which spins scraps of new wave, shoegaze, ambient and more into an ersatz vintage swirl.

People can say what they want about global warming and climate change. Like, for example, "The ice is melting!" Or, "No, it's not. You're a hippie!" Whatever the reason, though, more than half the country sweltered under record temperatures for extended periods this summer. Scratch that: they sweltered under record temperatures for the entire summer. And let's face it: you don't really care about the whys and hows behind the blindly oppressive heat when you're melting in the middle of it. The only real question you want answered is, "Where can we go where there's air conditioning?"

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we're still waiting for summer to arrive. Here's a fact: people were still skiing up at Lake Tahoe over the 4th of July holiday weekend! The 4th of July is supposed to be about barbecues and sunny skies, swimming and sinking your toes in warm sand — the exact opposite of skiing. Traditionally, our summer comes in May, teases for a couple of weeks, and then disappears into "June gloom" until sometime in September. The best time to visit San Francisco is the first week of October, but I have a sinking feeling that our beloved Indian summer is going to give us a miss this year.

I'm not super-big into the whole, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" adage. To me, that's a defeatist attitude. I'm more of a glass-half-full (make mine a sauvignon blanc) kind of person, with a dash of "not going down without a fight" thrown in for good (feisty) measure. So while I must admit that yes, summer is over and fall is upon us, I don't have to make the transition gracefully. But I will. Which brings us to this mixtape.

Here are a handful of gloriously classy songs that celebrate the fall season. Some sing of rainy days. Others of loneliness. All are perfect when enjoyed by a cozy fire. (OK, sure, a heater will do.) And all sound positively fabulous when heard from your MP3 player while bundled up in a winter coat with the sharp sting of the wind on your face. Hello Kitty rain boots are optional, of course.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: Autumn Hymnal

As a general rule here at Rhapsody HQ, our editors encourage us to transform our creative juices into raging rapids when concocting these Friday Mixtapes. They would've been thrilled to pickles had I pitched, say, any one of the following:

(1) Ten songs to crank when baking a loaf of cheddar-flavored San Francisco sourdough

(2) The ultimate soundtrack for changing my newborn's diapers in an airport restroom packed with Shriners from Dayton, Ohio

(3) Gloomy tunes that remind me of the 100 days I spent quarantined with pertussis in the eighth grade

I mention this only because I feel as if I need to apologize for the mundane theme behind this week's Friday Mixtape, Old School Aerosmith Effin Rocks! There are two good reasons for my decision, however. First off, and this point cannot be overstated, Aerosmith has finally made their entire discography available to Rhapsody for streaming. We now offer nearly everything, from Rocks to Nine Lives, Toys in the Attic to Big Ones, Rock in a Hard Place to Get Your Wings. For classic-rock nerds like me, this is huge. Who knows, maybe I'll finally purchase that 1978 Firebird I've always wanted and retrofit its stereo to play Rhapsody? As Wooderson once declared, "We're talking some f*ckin' muscle."

So anyway: the extremely sore arm came first. Was initially scared it might be carpal tunnel. Googling suggested otherwise. Was relieved to learn that it being on my right side was good news. (Left can be a sign of heart failure!) Doctor prescribed exercises and ointments and ice packs. Very weird, since I don't play tennis, but so be it.

Then, just as that was starting to heal, my stomach started hurting. A lot. After a couple days — longer than heartburn's ever lasted before — it got unbearable, so I got concerned. CAT Scan said acute appendicitis (which, hey, beats kidney stones or an ulcer), so I went to the emergency room and they took it out and I slept at the hospital for a night. And the thing about your appendix is, once it's gone, it's gone — didn't need the thing in the first place! Tummy's fine now; arm's still sore, just not as much.

All of that happened in the past couple months, so naturally I constructed a playlist of music that helped me through. Most of the songs don't relate directly to said medical conditions, though at least two prominently feature pills (and one a hospital bed), and several concern trying to pay bills when there are more than enough of them to go around. But usually they're not too depressing about it. (Well, maybe once or twice.) There are two consecutive, highly boisterous songs about the economic difficulties of being an all-woman band on the road, which may well have nothing to do with the topic at hand, but you never know. There is also a song about assembly lines followed by a song about grocery lines followed by a song about unemployment lines — which happened entirely by accident, I swear! Genres include vocal jazz, country, arena prog, funk, New Wave, didgeridoo soul-rock, gospel, Italo disco, and plenty of hard rock and metal, not necessarily in that order. Hey, whatever works, right? Can't vouch for you, but these worked for me.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Songs to Recover from Acute Appendicitis and Tennis Elbow With

In case you were wondering, yes, I was one of those people who would spend months perfecting a mixtape, design a collage of artwork for it, and then shyly hand over the cassette tape to some crush I mooned over in hopes that she would get my special "message." Don't front like you didn't do that, too.

Sometimes, though, I would simply create a mix that described my thoughts and feelings on life in general. It was akin to writing in a journal, though easier than confronting my thoughts nakedly transcribed on a piece of paper — the music allowed me to hide behind the sounds of others who could voice things that I could not or would not say. I worked on these 90-minute mixes — 45 to 50 minutes for each cassette side — by recording songs from a turntable, erasing and retaping them, and hoping the tape wouldn't break. (Yep, I used to make tape loops, too.) When I finished them, I not only gave the tapes to would-be lovers, but friends, too, just to let them know what was going on in my head.

The era of the cassette tape is long gone (though it's making a tentative comeback in indie circles; earlier this month, I copped new tapes by both MF Doom & Ghostface Killah, and Death Grips). So now I program songs in iTunes and Rhapsody, trying out different combinations, and hearing which fit together sonically and thematically. It's a less physical act than cuing up and manipulating a cassette tape, but the goals are the same.

As I said before, I often spend months on a tape. Due to time constraints, I knocked this one out in a few hours, so it's not my ideal mix. But its range of artists, from The Emotions to The Throne to Zomby to The Cure to Little Dragon, will give you a brief peek into where I am right at this moment.

Click here to listen to my playlist: Friday Mixtape: Mixtape Diary

For a five-second snapshot of what this mix is all about, listen to the opening seconds of Richard "Groove" Holmes' "Hittin' the Jug" at L.A.'s Black Orchid club in October of '61. It's only two bars into the tune when some guy in the audience, caught up in the heady combination of Holmes' strutting intro and a generous highball or three, shouts, "All right!" There couldn't be a better way to kick off this cocktail hour set of organ driven soul jazz and mid-century Blue Note party jams - this is music that accompanies a heavy pour, and a perfect warm-up for a Friday night.

Joining top-flight bandleaders from the '50s and '60s -- Jimmy Smith, Grant Green and Wayne Shorter among them -- are hand-picked cuts from deeper corners of Rhapsody's endless soul jazz vault (dig the harp- and flute-led "Afro Harping" delivered by Dorothy Ashby) and a few vocal favorites from Nancy Wilson, Ray Charles and Tami Lynn. Salud!

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: In the Pocket, Half In the Bag - Mid Century Soul Jazz Cocktail Hour

Ah, to partake in the miracle of flight. We all love to bitch about it, don't we? Louis C.K.'s bit on the absurdity of our whining really sums it up best: "'Ugh. But I had to pay for a sandwich….' You're flying! You're sitting in a chair in the sky! You're like a Greek myth right now! . . . New York to California in six hours! It used to take 30 years to do that, and a bunch of you would die on the way there!" This is all so true, but when you start thinking about your life being in the hands of unidentified pilots as you float up some tens of thousands of feet, you're bound to get a little edgy.

This is when Rhapsody becomes crucial. Once I hear those soothing words -- "you are now clear to use approved electronic devices" -- the headphones quite literally fly on. What helps me relax are songs and sounds with a rich, narcotic flow -- Radiohead, Four Tet, Portishead, the xx and M83, to name a few go-to artists. Anything to help lull me into a peaceful stupor (if only that kid would just stop kicking my seat already). This mixtape is lengthy enough for a cross-country flight, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

Click here for the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: Music for Airplanes.

It's been a cruel, cruel summer — the temps have been so high for so long that I can't even bear to have sunshine in my music. Bring on the rain, the melancholy, the somber tones of Morrissey, Emmylou Harris, Mazzy Star and Patty Griffin.

It may not make for your usual upbeat T.G.I.F. mix, but if you let them, these songs will wash over you and soothe your parched soul. From Lori McKenna's frustrated housewife on "Stealing Kisses" to the morose mining songs and shipwreck tunes of The Decemberists to the dead man walking in The Civil Wars' "Barton Hollow," this collection is wonderfully gloomy and gray. Soon enough it will be cooler outside, and I'll be ready for bright music and pounding, happy beats. In the meantime, this is how I plan to welcome the weekend.

Listen now to my Moody & Morose Mix.

My sister is obsessed with chickens. Like, seriously. She has a kitchen full of kitschy chicken stuff. Any time there's a call for a nickname to put on the back of a t-shirt, she goes for something poultry-related. She does a mean chicken impression (hen-pression? OK, maybe not): it's just not Christmas in my family without her clucked rendition of "Carol of the Bells." She even has a seriously awesome chicken tattoo on her forearm. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we grew up in a small, rural Midwestern farming town where many friends' families kept chickens. Maybe it's part of the new hipster trend of urban coops. We don't know how to explain it, other than that she's an, um, odd duck.

So what, exactly, does her fowl fixation have to do with music? Well, a few years ago, I started compiling a master list of chicken-related music: songs that reference chickens, songs that include chicken noises, songs that just, well, rock out with their cluck out. And guess what? It turns out that there are not only a LOT of chicken songs in rock and pop history (perhaps my sister isn't alone in her OCD -- Obsessive Chicken Disorder), but that, amassed, they make for one hell of a decent mix.

Listen up, chickens!

When I tell people I work in the music biz, the first question they ask is the obvious one: "What types of music do you like?" I find this akin to asking a chef their favorite food, or a pedophile their favorite Haley Joel Osment movie. I didn't gravitate toward this field because I wanted to lobby for the cultural merits of early-'80s straight-edge or West Coast cool jazz (though I would, happily, for both). I landed here because I find it endlessly fascinating that so many different types of folks choose to express themselves so differently using music, and that they do it over and over again, and have been for literally millennia. I love the mess of it all, not to mention the fact that it thrives in spite of -- at least in the last 100 or so years -- a massive capitalist machine whose inner workings are as calculating and mechanical as an auto mill's (and this is coming from someone who's part of that machine). It's pretty amazing when you think about it. I mean, like -- take that, painting.

Anyway, I'm rambling. The point I'm trying to make is that I listen to a lot of different sh*t. For my Friday Mixtape, I chose to slice that mélange according to a single criteria: piano. The tracks featured here all feature piano. They span decades and genres, styles and themes. And someone else, using the exact same criteria, would choose a completely different set of them. Mine is special to me for no coherent reason I can discern. Perhaps it'll be special to you too, and if not, well, there's plenty of other good sh*t out there.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: Piano Jamz

There's nothing like a major move to make you appreciate cloud-based music. As I wrote last week, my mom is selling her house, so I've been tasked with going through the approximately 3,000 records I have stored in her basement, and figuring out which to sell and which to ship back to Berlin, where they'll join another couple thousand pieces of vinyl already eating up all the available floor space. (My girlfriend has told me, in no uncertain terms, that we have space for exactly 1,600 more—that's the number of records that fits in Ikea's 4x4 "Expedit" model, the shelving of choice for DJs and hoarders the world over. So the culling is rather grueling.)

Despite a sore back, rug-burned knees and a frazzled brain, it's not all bad -- frankly, there's very little I'd rather do than just hang out with my records. There have been some happy surprises along the way, records I had no idea I owned: a pristine double of Theo Parrish's "Smile" to replace the played-to-hell copy in my DJ bag in Berlin, for instance, as well as 10 early singles from Parrish's Sound Signature label, all long out of print, and some of them fetching insane prices on Discogs.com. Speaking of insane prices, the process has reminded me that I really need a renter's insurance policy: the triple-vinyl edition of Boards of Canada's Geogaddi is going for upwards of $120; a white-label Global Communication remix of Lamb's "Gorecki" is selling for $160!

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: My Mom The Hipster.

Mom is, and always has been, super-cool. Back in the '80s, when most of my friends' parents were listening to the smooth sounds of Jerry Vale and Al Martino (I grew up in an Italian American neighborhood), she was pulling one killer LP after another from her collection and giving me an education in rock 'n' roll history: The Velvet Underground's Loaded, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, The Basement Tapes, The Doors and Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow. This last record was particularly special to me. I remember spending more than a few Saturday afternoons lying on her chenille bedspread, losing myself in the phantom harmonies of "How Do You Feel."

She provided commentary and insight as well, some of it gleaned from the pages of Creem and Rolling Stone. During my junior high Stones obsession, Mom regularly reminded me that they were a bunch of sexists ("Under My Thumb" still pisses her off), and Mick in particular was a twit, especially when he, in the wake of Altamont, blamed America for the deadly tragedy.

When you've written about music for as many decades as I have, and you're as addicted as I am to constantly hearing more of it, let's just say that things pile up: all formats, from all manner of dollar bins and thrift stores and garage sales, along with whatever comes in the mail. But that's my problem; as a Rhapsody subscriber, you don't even need to dig through crates, because I've already done it for you! Hence, this all-encompassing playlist of stuff I've been listening to in all physical and digital walks of life lately, its title inspired by the Fall's 2010 album Your Future, Our Clutter, whose leadoff (and sort-of title) cut is included, along with four '80s r&b songs at the beginning, four '70s hard rock songs at the end, and 32 other selections of multifarious genres and vintages in between (a veritable top 40!), including a scattered handful from 2011, early Huey Lewis and Ice-T cuts that sound more like Thin Lizzy and Run-D.M.C., and two funky numbers about wearing wigs on the dance floor. Enjoy it, employ it, shake it but don't break it.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: My Clutter, Your Future

So I'm standing there in a hospital gown holding my newborn son, who has been out of the womb now for maybe five minutes, and it occurs to me that I should sing something, except I hadn't planned out what it should be, and so I open my mouth, and what comes out is Tom Petty's "Alright for Now," which is not a bad choice actually, in that it seems to be an actual young-child lullaby-type song. This situation has reoccurred frequently over the course of the last three months, and no pattern to my ostensibly soothing songs has emerged: it's a bizarre mélange of old TV-show themes, wildly inappropriate minor rap hits, and Johnny Cash. My son's reaction ranges from bemused to indifferent, even in the case of " Maxwell's Silver Hammer," which I suppose I had planned, his name being Max and all.

See if you can make any sense of this: Songs I've Sung My Newborn Son