Thursday, June 04, 2009

Throwing Muses and Mix Tapes

I completely forgot that I used to have a tape of the Throwing Muses album "The Real Ramona" and I used to listen to it all the time. For someone reason, this morning when I opened Rhapsody, I just search for Throwing Muses. I can't say why. Now I'm listening to this album which I haven't heard probably since the early nineties. Some of the songs are incredibly familiar but I feel like I've never even heard a few of them. Although, I know I have since I used to listen to it all the time. I guess it didn't make that much of an impact on me that way.

For some reason, I think I have seen Throwing Muses maybe three or four times in concert. I think maybe they were a sort of all around opening band for a while there. Maybe they were on the college concert circuit and I managed to catch them for free. They are from Rhode Island so they are local-ish. I don't really remember anything much about them live, I just seem to recall that I've seen them. I guess they didn't make that much of an impact on me that way.

Throwing Muses, huh. I don't know if I like them or if I thought I was supposed to like them. NO. I DO like them. I say that because "Not Too Soon" just came on and it's a pretty awesome song isn't it? You know that song? It's a Tanya Donnelly song. I think she wrote the poppier ones. She went on to form Belly. Remember them? Sure you do.

Here is a live version. Not as good as the recorded but it's all I could find in five seconds of looking: Throwing Muses - Not Too Soon

I think "Not Too Soon" was on a mix tape my friend Dave made for me. We used to make mix tapes all the time with covers and titles, like Dennis was talking about in the comments section of my last post. We also used to include "inserts", which were little snippets of TV and Movies in between songs. This was done all on cassette, of course, and the inserts actually became some of my favorite parts of the tapes. When you listen to one of these mixes in the car over and over again, the little inserts almost became part of the song. It's kind of like on Beatles albums, you know, where John yells When Doris Gets Her Oats. These little snippets get pounded into your head. Eventually, it's strange to hear one of the songs without the little clip after it.

Maybe Dennis is right, maybe we should be making more mix CDs. The problem is, I subsist almost entirely on shuffle these days, nature's mix tape. If I had a car and if I drove it a lot, I would love the mix tape, but walking around listening to my iPhone, it doesn't really work.

I think that we will have another Rub Wrongways Night Great Mix-CD Mix-Up again in the near future, though. So look forward to that and start thinking of songs and inserts and fancy artwork for the cover. In the meantime, I'm gonna look through my boxes of cassettes to try to locate some of my old mix tapes.Throw

1 comment:

Dennis Crommett said...

i see what you mean about shuffle. "nature's mix tape," i like that. i very rarely use shuffle and when i do i end up skipping through like crazy (so much jazz, so many podcasts, and lots of music i don't actually like on my ipod. is that weird?).

maybe we friends can trade mp3 mixes, then? post things on a secret page, put a piece of photoshopped artwork on there, all downloadable as a zip file? is that too much work?

anyway this all makes me want to just go back to cassette.