I’m envisioning a future project — a list of bands that produced one excellent album but nothing else that crossed my radar.
This is different from a one-hit wonder because the whole album, not just a single song, has to be great. And it can’t be a group that has a few pretty good albums and one amazing one. This one album has to be the only work of theirs you own.
I look at a mixtape as a kind of movie without pictures. It should ebb and flow the way a movie does, with the talky parts balanced by the action. And like a great movie, it should contain two or three strong, memorable sequences around which the rest revolves.
Sometimes a mixtape (or a movie) is born from the desire to create just such a sequence. You fall in love with the alchemy between a series of songs, decide they’d be perfect about three quarters of the way through Side B, then seek out filler to occupy the rest of the space. That might not be the ideal way to create your masterpiece, but it happens that way quite a lot.
It’s funny to have a bunch of memories tied up in the only CD I own by a band I know just about nothing about, but that’s the case with The Smithereens’ Especially For You.
Flash back to my freshman year at the University of Florida, where I’m sharing a dorm room with a real asshole of a frat-guy cliche. We failed to click right from the start and fortunately he got an apartment a couple weeks into the semester and I wound up having the room to myself.
But once I was playing Elvis Costello and he told me Costello’s voice sounded a lot like the guy from The Smithereens, a favorite band of his. He played me a song and damned if he wasn’t right. Our one bonding moment.
Meet Me In Montauk 