A Sweet Story I'd Like to Share

For my guest slot this week, I'm streaming the best mixtape I've ever received. Go ahead and click. Start listening if you want. I'll keep writing, but you can avoid the rest of this post without missing anything important.

Thursday, Jeremy Hart linked to a mix he made using a new site called Muxtape.com. Muxtape is refreshingly minimal in its approach to copyright infringement:

1. Register your account.
2. Upload your songs one at a time.
3. Put them in order.

You're done. You can only upload a maximum of 12 songs, and no single file can be larger than 10 mb. That's not terrible considering the site is free, and there are no ads. Besides, having those limits reminded me of the days before CD burners and bit-torrent sites and terabyte hard drives, when I struggled to trim my mixes to 45 minutes a side.

So anyway, this Muxtape actually recreates a mix CD, one of several I received in a mix swap a few years back. There were 11 or 12 people involved, and you had to make one copy for each person in the group. Weeks after we exchanged mixes I was still listening to the same disc. Dude named Jay R. Ligon made it. He played keyboards in some local bands before moving to Korea to teach English, so you might know him. His mix is titled "A Sweet Story I'd Like To Tell." Here's the track list:

1. Johnny Daye - Stay Baby Stay

2. Isley Brothers - Hello It's Me

3. Razzy Bailey - I Hate Hate

4. Charlie Rich - Mohair Sam

5. Eddie Hinton - Running Back to You

6. Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man

7. Dann Penn - Dark End of the Street

8. Travis Wammack - You Better Move On

9. Jim Ford - I'm Gonna Make You Love Me

10. Sandra Rhodes - Where's Your Love Been

11. Ray Charles - Let's Go Get Stoned

Jay said one common thread was that most of the artists are white guys who helped define the Muscle Shoals sound. And the amazing sequencing seems to have a loose, sad-bastard narrative in mind. That's about all I know.

Sure, I read up on everyone I hadn't heard of, which was damn near every artist on the list. But I'm not gonna regurgitate that research here. I just hope you like it. Nearly four years later, I still jam it all the time.

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REM's Fabled Reconstruction

I haven't heard REM's new record yet, but I listened to a segment on XM Radio last week that featured two music critics arguing whether Accelerate was REM's long awaited "return to rock." For some flavor, here's a bit from Spin's Jim DeRogatis:

This hasn't been an easy decade for fans of R.E.M. The favorite sons of Athens, Ga., haven't made a beginning-to-end great album since "Automatic for the People" in 1992. Even guitarist Peter Buck now admits the band has been on a "downward slide."

Mind you, that hasn't stopped the musicians, their label or their tireless boosters from hailing every new release as the one that recaptures former glories or "the record where R.E.M. rocks again." And so goes the corporate line on "Accelerate," the band's 14th studio album, which arrives in stores on Tuesday.

We've heard this before -- with "Monster" (1994), with "Up" (1998) and even with the dreadfully dull "Around the Sun" four years ago. It wasn't true then, and it isn't entirely true now. But "Accelerate" is at least the band's most consistent and focused effort in 16 years, and with 11 songs breezing by in a little more than half an hour, it also has the healthiest pulse.

The one song they previewed on the show was called "Houston." Like Tom Waits's "Fannin Street," it's not very good. Neither song is likely to be a featured part of Houston's latest image makeover.

Rolling Stones on Emusic

The Stones are now available for 25 cents a song on Emusic.com. And it's not just one or two records either. Compare that with The Beatles' reticence to make their records available anywhere online, and it's just another reason I'll always be more of a Stones guy.