urgency to bleed

Fiona Apple is one of the first "good" musicians I started to like - if I hadn't discovered her I would probably be listening to completely different music now, even if most of my current favorites don't sound a thing like her - and I've loved her for so long that I don't listen to her obsessively anymore and she gets kind of overshadowed by things I've started to like more recently. But then, every once in awhile, I'll hear a song on shuffle or watch a video of her performing or something small like that and I'll suddenly realize once again how brilliant she is and it's almost like the first time I heard her. Anyway, Extraordinary Machine is definitely my least favorite Fiona album but it's got a few truly mindblowing songs and this is one of them. I just love the lyrics so much. Possibly my favorite Fiona song of all is "I Know" from When the Pawn... (which is a truly brilliant album through-and-through so if you haven't heard it you should definitely get on that - I'd almost say it's perfect but I don't much care for "The Way Things Are"... ah, whatever, it's perfect anyway) and I think it shares kind of similar sentiment. In Fiona Apple terms, they both have kind of happy endings, or at least only mildly depressing ones - in "Oh Well" she wastes her time on a total loser and spends the whole song telling us how terrible he is only to end on the title words, deciding that it's not such a big deal after all; in "I Know" her man won't leave his other woman but she's being patient and at the end, utters some of the best final lines to a song I've ever heard: "If it gets too late/For me to wait/For you to find you love me and tell me so/It's OK/Don't need to say it". Both of these songs can be construed as either devastatingly sad or slightly uplifting, depending on how you look at them. Anyway, I'm talking too much. Just listen to the song.


P.S. If you're too lazy to go back through the tags and find "I Know", here it is. Because you need this song. It is only one of my favorite songs ever by anyone.

It's still a month until Christmas but seeing as it is already completely white and miserably cold outside, this seems to be the perfect time to bust out the Christmas tunes anyway! Now, I don't know about you, but most Christmas music annoys me, so aside from a few traditional songs (though performed fantastically, of course) I've tried to mostly include ones that can be easily enjoyed all year 'round. Some are explicitly about Christmas while others are more vaguely winter-y or contain a fleeting mention of Christmas but are just so awesome that it's enough to count. Hopefully, this mix will bring you more enjoyment over the holidays than whatever crappy radio station playing those generic cheesy Christmas songs. As always, below the cut, you can find the tracklisting with links to each individual song or download the entire thing in a ZIP file.

( Sew up the bad that you've done - tomorrow Christmas day comes. )
Download entire mix (72 MB)