It's Been A Long Time...

I shouldn't have left you, at least not without a dope beat to step to. Fear not, after a successful and much needed tour of some European cities, the bakster is back.

My vacation is not what you came here to read about, no doubt. Unfortunately, for the purposes of this post, you need to hear a few more details about my personal life. My adventures had barely begun when a sort of tragedy struck. While sitting at gate N15 at the Sea-Tac airport my mp3 player, freshly loaded with a few thousand tracks specifically for this trip (including a few troubling and yet somehow still hilarious Bushisms) just stopped working. Just stopped working! I went into "Rescue Mode" and tried cleaning it up, but that didn't work. Resetting it a few dozen times didn't help either. So, an hour into a 17 day trip I found myself completely without music.

It wasn't until five days later that I found an old mixtape (a real mixtape, not a CD mix) buried at the bottom of my backpack. Thanks to a tape recorder I had brought with me to record my thoughts during the trip, I was able to enjoy exactly one cassette (front and back) worth of music during my travels.

Here are two songs I rediscovered thanks to a long forgotten "Westward Mix":

The Busy Signals - "The Freeway"

Electric Sound Of Joy - "Night And Day"

Nothing life changing here, but these quiet gems really fit well in the mix, which also included songs by Simon Joyner, Cat Power, Mercury Rev and The Only Ones. Besides, they were all the music I had, which made them, for those twelve days, the best songs in the world.