About Time: January 2026 mixtape

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube

Here’s the first mixtape of 2026! Made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.

This one gave me a little trouble. Back in December I texted a friend, “I’ve been building a whole December/January mixtape around the [Destroyer] song “kaputt” — real icy shjt like Cocteau twins, Roxy, cate le bon — will send it to you when it’s done.”

I had Cate Le Bon’s song “Love Unrehearsed” as the leadoff track, but then Walter Martin played “About Time” at the end of one of his shows and I decided to switch. Then I got to thinking about winter and how much I wanted to smoke a cigarette out in the snow and decided to put Mac Demarco on there.

One thing leads to another. Every time I try to make these mixes more conceptual or abstract (“icy pop songs with chilly fender guitars through chorus pedals”) I freeze up. But if I just start with a good leadoff track and think to myself, “What do I want to hear after this?” the mix just sort of makes itself.

I’m convinced this is also true of writing: if you start with big, conceptual, abstract ideas about what you want the piece to be, it’s easy to freeze. But if you just start with a good sentence and ask yourself, “What comes next?” the thing builds itself.

SIDE A

– cate le bon, “about time”
– mac demarco, “ode to viceroy”
– peter tosh, “legalize it”
– diana ross & the supremes, “reflections”
– tubeway army, “are friends electric?”
– king tubby, “straight dub”

SIDE B

– cocteau twins, “cherry-coloured funk”
– wye oak, “the tower”
– destroyer, “kaputt”
– the smile, “the smoke”
– rolling stones, “waiting on a friend”

You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

This is the 27th mixtape I’ve made in the past few years. The big 2024-2026 playlist list is over 20 hours long!

Filed under: mixtapes

It’s all been done

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

I’ve been having fun posting lines from whatever Montaigne essay I happen to be reading. The latest:

“Perhaps we really do live in a time which begets nothing but the mediocre.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

I like posting quotes like this without context or commentary, because people read into it all sorts of things, like, I quote, “bro living in the midst of the actual Renaissance.”

The major jolt I get from reading Montaigne is that over and over again this guy from 400 years ago has thoughts that I could be having right now.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” wrote James Baldwin, “but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

This is one of the great appeals of breaking bread with the dead.

And what is more comforting than realizing the feeling you’re having was had by someone so alien in space or remote in time?

My favorite example is from the afterword to Steal Like an Artist:

I’ve always wondered if Abraham Lincoln actually said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”

Here’s a little snippet from a 1924 — public domain! — book called Wit and Humor of Abraham Lincoln: Gathered from Authentic Sources (something about that subtitle makes me more suspicious, not less!)

The wheel of the blog

Friday, January 16, 2026

“…the wheeling seasons brought the year around…”
—Homer, The Odyssey

3 years ago I built a little widget for the sidebar of this blog that displays posts that were published “on this date.” I love checking it periodically, and I find that certain times of year I circle back around to certain topics (natural, given how seasonal our lives are) and certain days in the year are “hot spots” with especially good posts.

Today is one of them:

A current online trend is posting 2016 photos as a kind of nostalgic exercise. I get the decade lookback, but 2026 doesn’t feel like 2016 to me — it feels more like 2018. On this day in that year I was writing about soup.

A year after that I was writing about what we do with good teachings by people who do bad things.

A year after that I was posting my favorite D.W. Winnicott quote about hide and seek:

The full quote is actually this:

“It is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found.”
—D.W. Winnicott

He’s describing a child’s development, but I think the sentence could describe the life of an artist.

I wanted so badly to write a book called Hide & Seek, but it never turned out quite right. The first time I tried to write it, the result was Keep Going. Then the second time I tried to write it, the result was Don’t Call It Art.

I don’t think I’ll try to write Hide & Seek again. But I’m still really interested in this question: How do I hide and still be found?

Skip forward four years, and I was writing about gardening metaphors, which, in a way, contain the answer to the hide & seek question: we have planting seasons and we have harvesting seasons.

And to wheel back to just one ago, I was posting about a new mix, “Nurturing Your Inner Child.” I love that mix and just listened to it the other day. I’m currently working on a followup, the first mixtape of 2026.

And back to it I go now…