Boys and Girls Living Together :: An 8tracks Mix

Boys and Girls Living Together from 32feet on 8tracks.

Last summer 8tracks asked us to curate a summer mix for them, which we did and got us involved in their personalized take on Internet radio. After a long layoff, we returned to 8tracks this afternoon with a mix exclusively concerned with boy-girl pop music. Not surprisingly, most of this music is about break ups. Called "Boys and Girls Living Together" it comprises some of the best pop conversations between male and female vocalists (a trend that we traced to Human League's sex-power treatise, "Don't You Want Me"). The requirements were that each vocalist had to sing at least a verse or a bridge, not just the hook in the chorus. If you enjoyed the Postal Service's brutal "Nothing Better" or the masochism of Stars' "Elevator Love Letter," you already know this aesthetic well. Stream the mix above and take a spin around 8tracks and let us know what we missed.

All The Colors We Have :: An 8tracks Mix

This has been our summer of returning to the idea of the mixtape. We couldn't bring ourselves to name it, "All The Colours We Have" a direct tribute to the GROUPLOVE lyric which launches this mix, but the rest are all songs with a color in the title (or with the British spelling of "color" in the title, which is more popular than we realized), and no shade is repeated. "Blue" is easy, so is "red"; there are even more songs with "black" in the title, even it not being a real color. The trouble is the others. What is the best song you own with the word, "yellow" in the title? What about "Green", "Purple", or our furthest reach, "Golden"?  Long used as the emotional paintbrush, these are the best songs in our collection that make use of this type imagery. Drawn from the Decemberists, Yo La Tengo, California Wives, Clap Your Hands, and a bunch of others, the spectrum, like that of reflected light, is enormous and yet totally discrete.

All I Really Want Is Girls :: An 8tracks Mix

With the continued support of the wonderful people over at 8tracks, we've re-examined our music library with a new eye and increasingly arbitrary filters. This time, on "All I Really Want Is Girls", we avoid the Beasties' track of the same name, but keep the impulse, searching for the songs that feature a single-word, female name. That means Ben Folds' "Jane" would be in (though we went with "Emaline" instead) but the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" would be out. I know, arbitrary. You'll notice a lot of them end in the letter "a" either indicating that a lot of girl names end in this letter or that, at the very least, this closing vowel inspires song creation (read: love, heartbreak, etc.). We pulled from Avi Buffalo to Brandon Flowers, Miike Snow to Wolf Parade, about those faces that launched a thousand ships and those names that inspired all this great pop.

A Season Of Dilated Time :: An 8tracks Mix

A few days ago the good folks over at 8tracks asked us to put together a mix for summer. Luckily for them we're not above casual, passing flattery and we quickly threw together a bunching of songs that reminded us of warmer temperatures, or, as the title stolen from Michael Chabon suggests, "a coming season of dilated time." It's streaming over at our brand new 8tracks account, where we think we're going to be making a few more of these. If you're a regular reader, you'll notice a lot of favorites from the last few months (Capital Cities, Light Vibes, Bad Lamps, Auditorium, etc.), though minus the foghorn and genre-bending beat mixes of Natty Heavy's mix of a few weeks back. Like always, it's something to do while at work, you know, if you're not already shuffling the blog to death. Check it up.