Welcome to the Mixtape Corner
This is a cozy little section of the site dedicated to playlists.
While I’m still critical of Spotify and all that the streaming model entails, I am not immune to a good playlist. I guess when you spend all day listening to music (regardless of platform), your brain just automatically starts to categorize and sequence things in a way that makes sense.
I have around 500 playlists on Spotify, and if that sounds like a lot, you’re right! I don’t use them all, but they have each served a different role in my music fandom at one point or another. Some playlists are decade-spanning compendiums of an artist’s work organized chronologically; others are goofy jokes based on some superficial connective tissue. Some of these I listen to every week, others are an attempt to capture a specific time and place in my life. The point is that my Spotify sidebar is long and full of playlists, so I created this as a place where I can share some of my favorites and discuss them in short form.
Jake Ewald is a man of many words and styles. From his humble beginnings as an awkward, jilted romantic in Modern Baseball to the love-drenched adoration of Slaughter Beach, Dog and his recent forrays into lounge, folk, and earnest singer-songwriter exposition.
The man has always known how to turn a phrase, and with Ewaldism, I attempt to collect some of his most iconic tracks into one career-spanning playlist. Segmented by the two bands that make up his body of work, this playlist presents a movie-length way to witness Ewald’s writing develop in real-time from the dejected and confused-in-love MoBo to the self-assured maturity of SBD.