April 2025 (Part 1)

For the last couple of years I've been making monthly playlists, adding a song or two every few days until I have a collection of 20-30 tracks I like at the end of the month. It helps to have a running list of stuff that's either new or new to me that I've been enjoying, also cool to to have an archive of a bunch of 2+ hour long mixes full of songs I thought were interesting at some point in the last three years that I can throw on at work or in the car or whatever.

Lately I've been thinking about writing a little bit about each song I put on these mixes; not like deep criticism, more personal anecdotes, tangential observations, and vague connections. "Horse Combinations" is where that's going to happen.

Here are some thoughts about the first seven tracks on April 2025's mix, more coming soon:

Yo La Tengo - “Leaving Home”

I played YLT’s recently reissued soundtrack to Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy on a small Bluetooth speaker the morning of me and my wife's 2nd wedding anniversary while having room service brunch in our Las Vegas hotel room. Really nice!

This House is Creaking - “What Would You Do?”
Several people I follow on Instagram who know about indie rock bands in Chicago were posting about this new single, sort of a post-Spirit of the Beehive type of thing with a lot of cool production choices. Will definitely be looking out for what's next here.

Brian Eno - “Deep Blue Day”

I was finishing up Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the train ride into work listening to Apollo by Brian Eno. Pretty good!

Blaze Foley - “Cold, Cold World”
Blaze’s classic “Clay Pigeons” came up on a playlist I was listening to and it got me thinking about how I hadn’t really checked out much of his work at all. I threw on a few different of his albums that morning and The Dawg Years (1975-1978), a compilation of raw early recordings, hit the hardest. I love the sounds of kids babbling in the background throughout, it’s as if he knew he had no shot at peace and quiet when trying to record this track so just toughed it out with the added texture of ambient baby noise. See also Advance Base’s “Summer Music (Remix)” for a similar background noise situation that is just as nice.

Walt McClements - “Sirens”
Experimental accordionist Walt McClemons dropped his latest banger of an LP, On a Painted Ocean, a few days after I started reading Thomas Pynchon’s excellent Vineland and it became a go-to for accompaniment as I read on. Songs to get lost in a labyrinthine, decade-spanning paranoiac narrative to.

Bill Orcutt - “Requiem in Dust”

I wasn’t all that familiar with Bill Orcutt’s work outside of his recent work with his guitar quartet (live album out now on Hausu Mountain) so I spent some time digging into his back catalog. One of my favorite discoveries was How to Rescue Things, which pairs Orcutt’s unhinged guitar with a selection of chintzy 1950s orchestral pop instrumentals. What if The Caretaker was just a insanely talented goofball ripping on the guitar instead of some dour conceptual art project?

Hotline TNT - “Julia’s War”
🚨New Hotline TNT album alert🚨

Here's the whole playlist on Spotify (sorry), more writing coming soon.