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I'm Just a Tape is the third annual compilation tape we've prepared. We attempt to focus primarily on music we've acquired during the last year, although all the tapes have ended up having music from previous years as well.
The title of this year's tape, I'm Just a Tape, is a reference to, of course, I'm Just a Bill, the famous Saturday morning civics lesson. In case you're curious, last year's tape was Gogitchyertapebox (click to see its contents), a reference to The Gourds' album Gogitchyershinebox; the year before was Fire Up the Tape Deck, a reference to the Lion Rock song "Fire Up the Shoe Saw." (The Fire Up the Tape Deck page has not yet been created, but I leave the link there to remind me to do so.)
If you're curious about the font used on the tape cover, it's called "Cheesewiddler," and it's a font created by Chank as part of his Rockstar Fonts --- this one done in collaboration with a guy from Fluf, a band about which we know precisely nothing.
They Might Be Giants: Older. Ooooh, are we technologically hip or what? This is from TMBG's MP3-only album, Long Tall Weekend. It's a cool album, but since we just burned it onto a CD, we would just have soon bought it at a store as spent hours trying to get it to download. Oh well.
Babe the Blue Ox: T.G.I.F.U. BTBO will rule the world one day. BTBO will collectively be president, Congress, and the Supreme Court. BTBO will become the leaders of a new international church to be outlawed in China. We like BTBO. We were choosing songs while on a trip to Oklahoma and Arkansas over Thanksgiving; we ended up in a lot of Perkins, Denny's, and the like --- all the places this song is about. From The Way We Were.
Weston: La, La, Love You. This is off a Pixies tribute album called Where is My Mind?. There are some good songs, and some not-so-good songs. This one doesn't really do enough to make it different than the original, but we just love the "Not too hard" addition to the "Shake your butt!" (or, depending on your hearing, "Chicken butt!") at the beginning. Dena vetoed my desire to put the Reel Big Fish Casio-keyboard-esque disco version of Gigantic on the tape. It's hilarious, albeit filled with rather too much drum machine and synthesizer. She was probably right. We know nuttin' about Weston. This song makes it so the Pixies, despite having been broken up for years, have appeared in one form or another on all three tapes.
Sugar: A Good Idea. Okay, so we sort of cheated here. We bought Copper Blue back when it was first released and know every note of it. But sometime along the line, we must have lent it to someone and it never returned. So we bought it again this year, and we get to use it here. A great album, and, especially at the start, a Pixies-ish song, so it works pretty well here.
Fountains of Wayne: Red Dragon Tattoo. Though Babe the Blue Ox will run the government, FoW will be the Ministers of Pop. Utopia Parkway is a delight from beginning to end. Nobody's doing this stuff better than Fountains of Wayne.
Old 97's: Indefinitely. Fight Songs is not the band's best album; it lacks some of the excitement of earlier albums. Nonetheless, this is a good song that gets in one's head and stays there.
Kelly Willis: Fading Fast. What I Deserve, Willis's latest album, is an interesting one. Some great songs and good songwriting, combined with a great voice, should make for a great album. Instead, I think it's merely a very good album. It's a bit overproduced, perhaps --- it just never completely grabs you. Still, very good is better than most stuff out there, and this is a great song.
Tom Waits: Hold On. This is the <ahem> "hit" from Mule Variations. But unless you live somewhere with a lot better radio than we have here, you haven't heard it much, so we're guessing it'll be okay even though it was the single.
Liz Phair: Go West. We got Whitechocolatespaceegg last year and enjoyed it more than expected, so when we saw Whip-Smart used, we grabbed it. Good album, and this song grows on you (or at least it did on us). Seems to fit nicely with Waits, too.
Vic Chesnutt: Until the Led. Our friend Tom Selby had this song on his 1998 tape; we're behind the times, I guess. This is from The Salesman and Bernadette.
Suspect Bill: 5421 Countdown. This is from the Swingland compilation, released by local "Music of Your Life" (a/k/a American Standards) station KLBB, now owned by Minnesota Public Radio (which has admirably left the format the same). We don't know anything about Suspect Bill, except that they're local and that, according to their website, they broke up.
Squirrel Nut Zippers: Ghost of Stephen Foster. We actually got this in '98 but used a song from their Christmas release, so decided to revisit Perennial Vegetables. It's a good disc with excellent art design.
John Linnell: South Carolina. Starting both sides with They Might Be Giants-related artists, we continue our tradition of heavy TMBG inclusion. Linnell's State Songs, the first in a presumptive series featuring a song about every state in the union, was a bit of a disappointment to us. Some of the songs are improving with time, and this one works very well, but some are just sort of there. Oh well. This is a fun one.
Shonen Knife: Frogphobia. The best thing about this song is that they put the accent on two completely different syllables of "phobia" in different places in the song. Also, it's just a hilarious song. Off Brand New Knife.
Soul Coughing: 16 Horses. As part of Bill's writing for HoleCity, he gets random stuff in the mail from Fox TV, including a candle publicizing The Night of the Headless Horseman. Among the random stuff was the soundtrack to The X-Files: Fight the Future movie. This was on it.
Schoolhouse Rock: I'm Just a Bill (erroneously identified on our tape case as "I'm Only a Bill"). We picked up the Schoolhouse Rock box set this year. Dena remembers the songs more than Bill does, but this one, for obvious reasons, stuck with Bill pretty well too. Not terribly gender-inclusive, but so it goes.
De La Soul: The Magic Number. This is the only song on the tape not from a pretty recent purchase (the Squirrel Nut Zippers song came from a '98 purchase). But it quotes a Schoolhouse Rock song so it just seemed to fit nicely here.
Fatboy Slim: Praise You. Yes, it was the single. Yes, you've heard it a lot. But it's a slightly different version and also a very good song. We only picked up a three-song EP to see if the other stuff was as good as "Praise You." The other stuff is good, but not good enough to make us put a different song on the tape.
Len: Cheeky Bugger. Len does that Human-League-for-the-'90s song "Steal My Sunshine," which, though overplayed, remained a great song. This is a nice short catchy song from the same disc, You Can't Stop the Bum Rush.
Guided by Voices: Teenage FBI. Again, yes, it's the single, but we don't have good radio so we wouldn't know that. It's a perfect single and a perfect example of GbV. Off Do the Collapse.
Arcwelder: Do Something Right. Arcwelder ("Artsmelter? I think they're from Seattle.") is the best rock band on the planet and could easily become world leaders, but will allow Babe the Blue Ox to run things so Arcwelder's members can keep their day jobs. They're now referred to as elder statesmen in the Minneapolis music scene, which must be a tad disconcerting for them. In any case, their new album Everest is among their best.
Local H: All the Kids are Right. Pack Up the Cats is just a tough CD to choose a song from for a mix tape. There are plenty of good songs, but they tend to rock a little too hard to be able to fit with anything else at all. So we went with this, the single, which still rocks but is also a pretty funny song.
Waco Brothers: Fire Down Below. Waco Brothers have been called "Johnny Cash meets The Clash." Throw in The Pogues and I think they're pegged. It's one of multiple new projects from Jon Langford from The Mekons. Waco World is a really pretty cool CD. This was one of those "I've heard something about these guys; let's just buy it and see how they are" purchases.
Freedy Johnston: Tearing Down This Place. This is from an earlier Johnston CD, Can You Fly, which we picked up this year. I think the CD is a bit less polished than his later stuff, but in a good way --- it draws a bit more attention to itself rather than staying in the background.
Boukman Eksperyans: Mayi A Gaye. Before Ella was born, we bought several lullaby CDs. One of them, The Planet Sleeps, features lullabies from around the world, including this Caribbean one. Sleep well.
Comments? Questions? Corrected links? Write us.
And as always: The tape is recorded in Doubly, because the tape list is listening.