I had a musical Easter weekend. We watched Wayne’s World for pizza night on Friday, my band practiced for 4 hours on Saturday, and I spent most of Sunday afternoon making a new mixtape:

April is often a melancholy month for me. Last April I made an “April Showers” mix that I described as a “sad dad bad had” mix for spring with a bunch of country weepers and other stuff I like. This month, I got to thinking about Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” and wondered if I could do a frozen version of “April Showers” with a bunch of wintry-ish music that might still sound good in spring. (If you’d rather listen to something more upbeat, check out last month’s mixtape.)

A new challenge: a reader sent me a big box full of sealed, blank C90 cassettes, so now I’m faced with filling 90+ minutes of tape. (As I mentioned last month, many 90-minute cassettes are actually more like 94-minute cassettes, because the manufacturers added a few extra minutes of tape to each side.) So this mix is something like 1 hour and 34 minutes long, with a few long tracks on side two:

The Sufjan Stevens track started off a mix of music we played at our wedding almost 20 years ago. I was going to follow it with another song from the wedding mix, Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost,” but NASA’s Artemis II mission influenced me, and I chose “This is How We Walk on the Moon” instead. (I thought “Ashes To Ashes” would sound good after it, somehow forgetting that Bowie calls back to “Major Tom” in that song!) The things that look like moons on the cover are actually coins from a headdress in National Geographic:

You can listen to “Snow in April” on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Filed under: mixtapes