The Mixtape Diaries

It's been a while, listeners, but we've mustered a quorum.  Bob's back with us today (alas, Mark is not), as we talk about some recent shows we've seen and generally ham it up.

First Bob waxes rhapsodic about Nashville band Bully.  Then Brad swaps out a vowel and steers the conversation toward Belly.  And we wrap it all up with Carla's trip to Vegas to see U2 in The Sphere.

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

Attached hereto is the final episode of the Carla, Brad and Mark Sessions.  We kept it Stateside for this one, with picks from The Hold Steady, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Car Seat Headrest.

Carla could've used Bob's alliance for her pick.  (He'll be back soon!)  Brad shared his disdain for new music from old bands.  And Mark delivered our favorite pick of the episode.  Get ready to rock!  These songs sound best played loud.

Find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

Here's another bite-sized episode from the Carla, Brad, and Mark Sessions.  Three-quarters capacity means just three songs, but we made 'em count.

Brad asked for cover songs by punk and post-punk bands, and the Skeleton Crew responded with Wire, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and the Slits.

Turn on, tune it, and rock out with the Mixtape Diaries, as we, um, let it all hang out!

Find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ Outro - Sinéad O'Connor, "Troy"

Last month we lost Sinéad O'Connor.  This one really hurts.   35 years ago, Sinéad's first LP was melting the cassette decks in our cars.   Through the years, we moved with her music, and it never got old.

Songs of heartbreak, defiance, freedom, vindication: Sinéad sang her life and her truth.  If her music doesn't move you ... well, unsubscribe. 

Sister, we are stretched on your grave.  Nothing compares 2 u.

Find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ Outro - Sinéad O'Connor, "Troy"

Mark, Carla, and Brad are back in short order to add three more songs to the Playlist.  (Bob's lazing in his hammock on summer vacay.)

Speaking of summer vacation, we logged some mileage on this one.  Our itinerary took us first to Oklahoma City to hang with the Flaming Lips, then to Halifax, Nova Scotia for some time with Plumtree, and finally to Delhi to swing a little with Peter Cat Recording Co. If we come off a little slap-happy, blame the jet lag ...?

We promised a fight that we may or not have delivered.  We'll let you be the judge.

Don't go gypsy jazzing!

Find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

Your Diarists are back! But it's summer break and we're down a man, so we've opted for a themeless episode.

What once was a Grab Bag is now the Wild Card: Carla, Brad and Mark picked three songs that are in their rotation right now, and it seems we're all hanging out in the late 1970s with picks from Suicide, Joy Division and Buzzcocks.

Find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

Picking up where we left off with selections from six more Scottish artists, as Carla and Brad take their turns.

Things get just a bit feisty as Belle & Sebastian, Teenage Fanclub, CHVRCHES, One Dove, the Pastels, and Trash Can Sinatras join the playlist, and the question we're all asking is ...

WHERE THE HELL IS PRIMAL SCREAM?

We wanna get loaded, and we wanna have a good time.  And that's what we're gonna do.  Away baby: LET'S GO.

Find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

The MTD gang is *alive and kicking*!  Join us as we *head on* out north of Hadrian's Wall, into the land of Nessie and haggis, Kidnapped and Trainspotting.

*Say what you want*, but we love us some Caledonian tunes here at The Mixtape Diaries.  *In a big country* like Scotland, you're gonna find tons of options, and we struggled to keep to our per-person limit of three songs.

Also, *take me out* for *garlands*.  (Hey, cut us some slack: not every song title works in this context.)

Here in Part 1 we talk through Mark and Bob's selections.  Look out for Cocteau Twins, Simple Minds, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Big Country, Franz Ferdinand, and Texas.

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

The Diarists have recovered from Carla's inclusion of a 18+ minute Can song in Part 1 of this episode, so now we're back with Part 2. Brad and Mark give us their picks for songs featured in rock critic Robert Dimery's list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

We cross genres and decades here with picks from David Bowie, Love, Neu!, Arrested Development, Smashing Pumpkins and Doves.

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

There's no shortage of terrific songs on rock critic Robert Dimery's list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.  For this and the next episode, Mark challenges us to choose some of our favorites.

Note the new format: six songs from Bob and Carla in this episode — The Clash!  Jamiroquai?  Spiritualized!  The Waterboys!  Sugar!  Can!)— with six more to come from Brad and Mark in our next posting.  The aim here is to keep the content flowing.

Krautrock in the Playlist?  Achievement UNLOCKED!

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

In this Grab Bag episode, Mark, Brad, Bob, and Carla serve up tracks from Gustaf, the Waitresses, Death Cab for Cutie, and Royal Blood.

Get back in the saddle with The Mixtape Diaries!  There's more where this came from!
 
As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.   And if you like what you hear, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

Your Diarists are back on the mic, cold chillin' in effect.  Today's assignment?  Serve up examples of fly tracks with *samples*.  Riffs and bass lines, beats and lawsuits: sampling is the story of the 80s, the 90s, the 00s ... of the last 40 years, really.

All kinds of surprises in this episode: Carla makes The Case for Portishead, rattling Mark in the process; Bob continues his will-he/ won't-he flirtation with Sabbath, and Brad presumes to announce The Best Song of the 1990s.  Oh, and did you know Fatboy Slim played bass for the Housemartins?

Joining the Playlist today is a fun batch of twelve songs (plus their samples) from A Tribe Called Quest, Fatboy Slim, Moby, Beastie Boys, Chapterhouse, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Dirty Vegas, Beck, Arctic Monkeys, Afrika Bambaataa, Portishead and Glass Animals.
 
Listen through the episode's end music for a little surprise.

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.
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If you like what you're hearing, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

Your Diarists are back with another Grab Bag episode. No theme, just four songs they've been wanting to add to the playlist. Get ready! These are four great additions from King Krule, Dressy Bessy, The Darling Buds and Liz Cooper. 

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.

If you like what you're hearing, please share, rate and review us!

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

St. Patrick's Day may be a foggy memory, but not for your Diarists. We couldn't let the holiday go by without sharing four of our favorite Irish tunes. Joining our Playlist today is a classic from the Chieftains and a few brawlers from the Pogues, Flogging Molly and Enter the Haggis.

Fair warning: (1) poor Irish accents abound in this episode, (2) Brad threatens to play a tin whistle, and (3) Mark can't stop quoting "So I Married an Axe Murderer."  There was no whiskey in our jars ... we swear!

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.

If you like what you're hearing, please share, rate, and review us. 

Credits: Intro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"; Outro - Dropkick Murphys, "I'm Shipping Up to Boston."

The Diarists' assignment for this episode is to come up with three songs with non-English lyrics —

"But wait," Bob asks, "do *all* the lyrics need to be in a foreign language?"  "Not necessarily," says Brad, who chose the theme.  Enter the Talking Heads ... and with them, Nena, Juliana Hatfield (!), Plastic Bertrand, Falco, Grauzone (Krautrock, from Mark?!?), Seu Jorge, Les Rita Mitsouko, Bananarama (!!), Cornershop, Sigur Ros, and Stereolab.

Join us as we spring songs in French, German, Portuguese, Swahili, Punjabi, and Icelandic on the Playlist!

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

In this new mini episode, your Diarists each discuss a song they've had on heavy rotation lately. No theme today, although we do dance through the decades with bands like Big Brother & Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Orange Juice, Corey Flood and Scary Pockets. Mmm....these songs are real bops. 

Stay tuned for more B-Sides in between our themed episodes. We just want to give the people what they want...more The MixTape Diaries content! 

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music, and your Extras on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/mtdiaries

If you like what you're hearing, please share, rate and review us. 

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter."

In today's super-sized (!) episode the Diarists remember Meat Loaf, then go on to consider twelve bands that also could have stuck with us a bit longer -- including the United States of America, Television, the Teardrop Explodes, the La's, Lush, Joy Division, the Sex Pistols, Jane's Addiction, the Verve, the Unicorns, the Seahorses, and the Organ.

"Baby, we could talk all night ..."

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

In today's episode the Mixtape Diaries crew calls out some of their favorite songs by female solo artists.  Join us as we work through our feelings about folk rock, the 90s vs. the 70s, and fake American accents.

Today we welcome Nina, Chaka, Donna, Courtney, Dusty, Maya, Kay, Björk, Sharleen, Holly, Cat, and Ani into The Mix.  No one on the corner has swag like us.

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter." 

Wait — what?  Two episodes in two weeks?!?  It's a CHRISTMAS MIRACLE, with your Festive Foursome back in a hurry to talk about some of their favorite (and not-so-favorite) Christmas songs.

Joining us on The Nice List are the Pogues, Bowie and Bing, Weezer, Ella, Jose Feliciano, She & Him, the Kinks, the Vince Guaraldi Trio, John and Yoko, Darlene Love, the Waitresses, Elvis and more!

Dim the lights, stoke the fire, egg the nog, and Yule it up with the Mixtape Diaries.  Your heart will grow three sizes this day.

Credits: Intro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ Outro — Cocteau Twins, "Frosty the Snowman."

Big changes happening here, as we add a *fourth* Diarist (!) and spin *twelve* classic tunes into the mix.

In this episode we reach back before 1975 for our selections, and we find Billy Preston, Elton John, David Bowie, Blue Cheer, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jesus Christ Superstar, Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, Van Morrison, Fela Kuti, the MC5, and the 5th Dimension.

As always, find the Playlist on Spotify + Apple Music and your Extras on Twitter.

Credits: Intro/ Outro — the Februarys, "Does Your Father Know"/ "... In a Letter."