Austin Kleon

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Autumn leaves (a September mixtape)

Here’s a mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

I wasn’t planning on making a mix in September, as I considered the “Make Time Stop” mixtape the real September mixtape, just made in advance. But something called to me today, so I went for it.

Mostly jazz, because that’s pretty much all I’ve been listening to, with a few detours:

SIDE A

– Cannonball Adderley, “Autumn Leaves”
– John Coltrane, “My Favorite Things”
– Bill Withers, “Can We Pretend”
– Vince Guaraldi, “Peppermint Patty”
– Bill Evans Trio, “Waltz For Debby”

SIDE B

– Miles Davis, “’Round Midnight”
– Miles Davis, “Milestones”
– Vikingur Olafsson, “Bruyeres” (by Debussy, home recording)
– Mulatu Astatke, “Tezeta (Nostalgia)”
– Vince Guaraldi, “Great Pumpkin Waltz”
– Charlie Parker, “Perdido” (live at Massey Hall)
– Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, “Song Of Abayi”
– Jack Kerouac (w/ Steve Allen on piano), “Charlie Parker”

I don’t know about this one. It went all over the place. The “Great Pumpkin Waltz” on side two feels a little much to me? But that “Peppermint Patty” after Bill Withers felt right. (I don’t know what possessed me with “Can We Pretend” — it’s just one of my favorite songs.)

I tried to use physical media as much as possible for this one, although while I was recording the tape I realized that my turntable was picking up the rumble from me rolling across the room in my chair.

No rumble online, but less character:

This is the 10th mixtape I’ve made this year — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 7+ hour playlist out of them.

Filed under: mixtapes

Handmind is heartwork

I made a recent batch of lifted type collages that were inspired by my friend Alan Jacobs. During the early days of the pandemic, Alan wrote a piece called “Handmind in Covidtude” that quoted a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home:

It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.

You can read more and see the other pieces in the newsletter.

Laziness and discipline

I have written often of the deep connection I feel between my laziness and my productivity.

Here’s writer Hanif Abdurraqib on The Stephen Satterfield Show, putting it much more poetically, so much so that I thought it was worth transcribing in full:

I came to writing significantly later than most of my peers. I have no ‘formal education’ in writing, I didn’t study writing in college, I wasn’t very good at school. But I always had these obsessions and interests and excitements, particularly around music. And for me that meant that for a long time, because I wasn’t a writer, those things were just building, and I would store them. I kind of have an internal archive of excitements and I did not always have access to a place for them….

I constantly sit on a lot of ideas. So what that means for me is that I have to be disciplined and kind of thoughtful.

I’m very lazy!

I think there are multiple kinds of people in the world: There are people who are hard-working and disciplined. There are people who are hard-working but pretty un-disciplined — so there’s a scattershot way their work appears in the world. And me, I’m pretty lazy, but I’m very disciplined. Perhaps more disciplined, I would guarantee, than anyone you know.

Satterfield asks him how somebody can be both lazy and disciplined.

They act in opposition to each other, right?

So the laziness is kind of inherent. Which means that I know that left to my own devices, I would do nothing. I would prefer to do nothing. And I don’t mean nothing in the sense of like, replying-to-an-email nothing, I mean literally, not-getting-out-of-bed nothing.

I was an athlete. I played basketball, I played soccer in college. So I had to learn a type of discipline, because my love for what I was doing propelled me towards that discipline.

Suzan-Lori Parks, a playwright who I adore, says this thing about how discipline is simply a love for your big self. And that’s kind of the path that I follow, because I’m driven to get the things I’m excited about out of my head. Because I don’t know how good they do me — just me in the world — if they’re only in my head.

And that isn’t saying that everyone needs to see them, it just means that there has to be some kind of extraction process that fuels and excites me. Writing does that. Writing about music, specifically, does that.

I can be in opposition to my inherent laziness, and build a discipline around, not even the work of writing, but the work of joyful extraction. And to present it like that, and to put it like that, offers me a better runway to it.

And I cannot stay in bed, because I would much rather be in pursuit of some revelation that might arrive to me in the process of doing this work.

So that’s how I act in opposition to my own laziness.

There’s so much there, and so many phrases I want to clip and build whole pieces out of, like, “an internal archive of excitements” and “joyful extraction.” It’s also impossible for me not to try to read an Ohio thing into it. (Hanif and I were born the same year and grew up about 45 minutes away from each other.)

I also want to join Hanif’s Church Of Minding One’s Own Business. Elsewhere he has said, “My superpower is that I mind my own business. And I actually think that helps my productivity more than anything.”

Filed under: laziness

Lean on Me

“We talk of poetry in such an abstract way because most of us are bad poets.” —Nietzsche

I loved this note from Ethan Hein about the final day of his songwriting course, which ended with “a spontaneous singalong” of “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers.

“I consider it to be the best American song recorded in the past hundred or so years,” Hein writes. “I made the case that it would make a better national anthem than our current terrible one.”

Here is a video of Withers singing it on the BBC in 1974:

Bill Withers talked to SongFacts.com about writing the tune:

This was my second album, so I could afford to buy myself a little Wurlitzer electric piano. So I bought a little piano and I was sitting there just running my fingers up and down the piano. That’s often the first song that children learn to play because they don’t have to change fingers – you just put your fingers in one position and go up and down the keyboard. In the course of doing the music, that phrase crossed my mind, so then you go back and say, “OK, I like the way this phrase, Lean On Me, sounds with this song.” So you go back and say, “How do I arrive at this as a conclusion to a statement? What would I say that would cause me to say Lean On Me?”

Withers maintained that the song came from where he came from: West Virginia, “a place where people were a little more attentive to each other, less afraid” than the people he noticed in big cities. Withers called it “a rural song that translates,” and he told a story about having a blow-out on an Alabama back road and somebody helping him.

I spent some time yesterday listening to “Lean on Me” and transcribing the lyrics on my typewriter.

When Withers died, I shared a few lines from the song and noted how incredible it was that he spun songs out of such simple, everyday language.

In the same SongFacts interview from above, Withers said that he was “a snob” about lyrics.

It’s very difficult to make things simple and understandable… To me, the biggest challenge in the world is to take anything that’s complicated and make it simple so it can be understood by the masses…. When I say I’m a snob lyrically, I mean I’m a snob in the sense that I’m a stickler for saying something the simplest possible way with some elements of poetry. Because simple is memorable. If something’s too complicated, you’re not going to walk around humming it to yourself because it’s too hard to remember.

He said his music was enduring because it was “re-accessible,” people could recall it. He said, “I don’t walk around with a piece of paper in my hand all the time, so if I don’t remember it, it means it wasn’t very memorable so it’s probably in the wind somewhere.”

But he also said that you have to be careful, because the process can’t be totally explained:

There’s an X-factor that we all function under. And that has nothing to do with you, it’s an accident of birth. That’s the gift that you have. That’s why it’s called a gift, it means you can’t go out and buy it, you can’t go out and get it from anybody, it has to be given to you. I’m doing the best I can trying to explain this stuff, but I don’t have any explanation as to what separates me from anybody else, except certain things were given to me. The real and most profound answer to anything you’ve asked me – why did you say this or why did you that – is because it crossed my mind. Why did it cross my mind versus crossing your mind or anybody else’s mind?

He then joked about the irony that when he first wrote the song, nobody would shut up long enough to listen to it, and now everybody wants to know about it!

The whole interview is worth reading.

Related reading: “Heading out for Wonderful”

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