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Easter in East Austin, 2013. The sign reads: “Don’t make your own easter eggs — ain’t nobody got time for that!”
Today’s newsletter is about the other kind of easter eggs:
It turns out our tweens aren’t too old for an egg hunt, so we got out the plastic easter eggs for at least one more year and hid them around the yard.
I can’t pull out Easter eggs without thinking about the other kind of Easter egg — the hidden feature or message. I don’t think everybody knows this, but I hide two Easter eggs in almost every one of my Friday newsletters…
Read the rest here.
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
From my letter, “Desert not-so-solitaire”:
I don’t know how or when it happened, but I’ve somehow become a person who likes being in the desert? It started a few years ago driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, then developed on trips to Joshua Tree and New Mexico. Last week for spring break we took a little 3-night trip to Arizoña (I pronounce it like Matt Berry), hiked in a canyon outside of Sedona, stargazed under dark skies, looked at the sun through a solar telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and caught a Cleveland Guardians spring training game at Goodyear Ballpark in Phoenix. (The most fun I’ve ever had at a baseball game. Highly recommended.)
I’m already planning a trip to another canyon.
In a recent Tuesday Trio, I wrote about introspection, and quoted Ian Leslie:
I’m often struck by how many high achievers are unencumbered by self-reflection. To take an example close to home, I’ve read or watched countless interviews with Paul McCartney, and he is at his least interesting on the topic of Paul McCartney. It isn’t that he doesn’t have a rich inner life. It’s that he puts it into his work – into the songs. His therapist is his guitar.
I think this a key to some of the problems Walter Martin has with McCartney’s work that he and I discussed on his radio show. Walter and I both grew up Lennon worshippers, so we got together to talk about our mixed feelings of admiration and bewilderment concerning Mr. McCartney and Morgan Neville’s new documentary, Man on the Run.
After we talked, I wrote a whole letter about McCartney’s creativity in 3 photographs, and included this chart of my ongoing relationship with the Beatles’ music:
There really is no in between for me. I’m either all in, or all out, which is why any new Beatles book, any new Beatles movie, any new Beatles anything has the ability to send me down the Beatles hole.
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