I can’t sleep after that Warriors/Clippers game that I can’t believe I watched from beginning to end. So, I created a thing. It might be better described as a series of songs that flow into one another, effectively making one long song, or “medley”, except all of the songs-within-the-song are performed by different people. A “mixture” of musical styles and personnel, basically.

It is called Dog Wearing a Stegosaurus Costume, which also describes the art (above), because the notion of digital-only collections of music having “art” is ridiculous, and so is a dog wearing a stegosaurus costume¹. It can be downloaded here. I started in on it to have something to listen to on the train ride back to New York City tomorrow, so the emphasis is on driving kinds of songs that might sound all right while looking out the window of a train, or while trying to read a book² on a train.

The first piece in the thing is “It Was Up In the Mountains,” which is a short John Giorno thing about celebrating holidays. From there, it does this:

1. Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra - Beginning Of the Heartbreak
2. Lumerians - XuluX
3. Cave - Machines and Muscles
4. The Pastels - Baby Honey
5. The Meat Puppets - Look At the Rain
6. Reports - Dinamo Cambridge

Actually, it ends with “Love Performance” by Total Control, which doesn’t exactly fit with the rest of the things, but is my favorite song of 2011, so it seemed nice to include in a skippable place. Also, its refrain (“These are not the last days”) seems like a good 2011 thing for pretty much every conceivable reason³.

(I had meant to include “Those Pockets Are People” by Electrelane between the Pastels and the Meat Puppets, but accidentally forgot it when compiling them into one big thing. It’s a little intense for this thing, anyway, though it would have been kind of neat if I separated both “Beginning Of the Heartbreak” from “Don’t, Don’t” and “Those Pockets Are People” from “The Partisan” on the same thing.)

¹ That is also the name of the compilation because thematic continuity is important in a mix something something Rob Sheffield?

² The Right Stuff, currently, which is pretty good but I bet there’s a graduate thesis somewhere that supposes Tom Wolfe has Asperger’s because of how much he likes repeating himself.

³ I had a big thing written out about that song, actually, but it devolved into thoughts on “still having to get out of bed” or whatever, which was so stupid that I threw my computer out a window and killed myself and now I’m dead, which is why I’ve been using footnotes so much lately. Because I can’t do that twice.