A Day Too Long - Austin Kleon

A day too long (November 2025 mixtape)

Monday, November 10, 2025

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube

Here’s another new monthly mixtape 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.

I actually snapped the tape while playing this mix back, but I managed to fix it (maybe only temporarily) with some transparent tape and an x-acto blade. Old school!

This mix exists because I wanted to build a tape off of the Time Out of Mind outtake version of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi,” which is sort of what this November feels like to me.

Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now

It’s weird when you make a mix in early November, because there are still Halloween vibes floating around. Very autumnal.

There are two Geese songs on there because I love those kids. I won’t gush again like I did a few weeks ago, but Meg and I saw them live last week and they were great. A band that can pull off covering The Stooges and New Radicals? Hell yeah.

side a

– Dylan, “Mississippi” (Time out of Mind outtake)
– Geese, “Cowboy Nudes”
– Donovan, “Get Thy Bearings”
– John Holt, “Ali Baba”
– The Magnetic Fields, “I Think I Need A New Heart”
– Toots & The Maytals, “Let Down”
– Jeremy Steig, “Howlin’ for Judy” (chopped by the end of side one)

side b

– Van Morrison, “Dweller on the Threshold”
– Velvet Underground, “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
– Sonny & The Sunsets, “ Green Blood”
– Geese, “Au Pays Du Cocaine”
– Grateful Dead, “Friend of the Devil”
– Cowboy Junkies, “Sweet Jane”
– Michael Hurley, “O My Stars”

I kind of like how sort of obvious side 2 gets. I think mixes get better sometimes when you stop being clever and just put songs on there you’d listen to a million times over, like when you were fifteen and making a mix.

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

Filed under: mixtapes

The gathering of art

Thursday, October 30, 2025

From my letter, “The Art of Messing Around”:

Priya [Parker] asked me if my newsletter had a title (it doesn’t) but the more I think about it, it’s funny that her book is called The Art of Gathering, because a title for this newsletter could be, The Gathering of Art. (At least, that’s what I’m trying to do.)

I’m in a big input phase right now — the heavy lifting on the next book is pretty much finished until the release next year, and I’m casting about for what comes next, or at least what I want to spend the rest of the year on.

I’ve been dreaming a lot and writing them down. From my letter, “What do you do with your dreams?”

I started writing down my dreams as a teenager, after I got my hands on Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams. He collected his dreams by scribbling in his notebook the minute he woke from sleep. Over the years, I’ve been on and off again with dream logging — lately, I’ve been writing them down in my diary again after I finished another James Hollis book.

The responses to that letter led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, from artists playing with the hypnagogic state, to the brain’s nightly cleanse, to this video of a Windows 95 screen defragging a hard drive.

I followed it up with another letter, “Dream, baby, dream,” which quoted Werner Herzog in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams:

“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams. And I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project. It’s not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in a field.”

Music is the other thing I can’t get enough of. (Really, ever.) Just listening to a ton of music. Somehow this blackout, “Overheard on the Titanic,” just keeps getting realer and realer.

No Fun! (a mixtape)

Monday, October 6, 2025

This one is kind of a sequel to “The October Country,” except I wanted it to kind of capture the misery of October in Texas — a dusty, hot October Country of torture, where you watch everyone else enjoy Autumn while Summer continues to rage.

I also wanted it to be just a little bit spooky and in the minor key, since it’s spooky season and all.

SIDE A
— The Stooges, “No Fun”
— The Kinks, “Nothin’ in This World Can Stop Me Worrying About That Girl”
— Althea & Donna, “Uptown Top Ranking”
— Joy Division, “Isolation”
— Suicie, “Ghost Rider”
— Frank Ocean, “Ivy”
— Mazzy Star, “Fade Into You”
— The Castaways, “Liar, Liar”

SIDE B
— The Make-Up, “Grey Motorcycle”
— Desmond Dekker, “Fu Manchu”
— Marty Robbins, “They’re Hanging Me Tonight”
— Outkast, “SpottieOttieDopaliscious”
— The Slits, “I Heard it Through The Grapevine”
— The Pixies, “Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)”
— The xx, “Infinity”

Side A of the actual mixtape ends with a line from Ian McKellen reading The Odyssey:

…the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will—sing for our time too.

And Side B ends with the first lines of Giamatti’s ode to baseball, “The Green Fields of the Mind”:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.

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

Filed under: mixtapes

Shooting pool in dad’s basement (a mixtape)

Saturday, September 6, 2025

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

This one gave me some technical difficulties. I actually destroyed two cassettes trying to record it, so I wound up with a cassette that was longer than I thought it’d be, so I had a little Side A / Side B fun and made Side A (mostly) songs that my dad likes and Side B songs from my dad’s era that I like.

Dad was born in 1954, so his peak nostalgia zone — the music he heard as a tween/teen in the mid to late 60s — just happens to be some of the best music ever recorded. (A few of his favorites didn’t make it here: The Byrds’ “Tambourine Man,” Creedence’s “Suzie Q,” Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” etc.)

I’d had the idea for the tape for a while, but Walter Martin’s organ episode gave me the final push to make it. Putting it together made me realize how much I really genuinely love Boomer music — I can’t help it!

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Filed under: mixtapes

The counterpoint of pictures and words

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Here is a page from my pocket notebook of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen discussing a new picture-book version of “Hansel and Gretel,” which was made by Stephen King adding words to Maurice Sendak’s designs for an opera.

JON: I’d say the illustrator is in the business of reacting to the text, doing work the manuscript doesn’t do. This can mean providing new information, adding a different tone or even subverting the words a little.

MAC: It’s this fluid, playful dynamic between text and image that animates the art form. As Sendak himself put it, the picture book is “an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint. … Words are left out — but the picture says it. Pictures are left out — but the word says it.”

That Sendak quote is from his praise for Randolph Caldecott:

Caldecott’s work heralds the beginning of the modern picture book. He devised an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint that had never happened before. Words are left out – but the picture says it. Pictures are left out – but the word says it. In short, it is the invention of the picture book.

I fixated on Sendak’s use of the word “counterpoint,” because I sort of remembered him being a classical music geek. (I remembered correctly.)

In another interview, Sendak explained his counterpoint idea in a little more detail:

I think what happens is if you’ve got enough confidence in yourself and you’ve resolved the text, that the pictures then do a second story, not be a mere echo. “Jane walked into the room and was eaten by the plant.” You don’t need to draw that, although maybe you’d like to draw that. But, in fact, you should draw something else. There should be a counterpoint between your pictures and your text. The best-illustrated books are the books where the text does one thing and the pictures say something just a little off-center of the language, so they’re both doing something. Otherwise you have an echo chamber. The most boring books are where the pictures are restating the text.

Who needs that? The text said it much better. So you cannot separate the pictures from the text, you shouldn’t be able to, not in a well-constructed book. They should fit in like machinery.

Because music is really my first love, I am always looking for musical metaphors to help me conceptualize my writing better.

A footnote: This morning I heard R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It,” and I was thinking about how much I like Mike Mills’ backing vocal response to the main chorus line. (“It’s time I had some time alone.”) It reminded me of The Beatles’ “Getting Better,” how Paul McCartney’s “Got to admit it’s getting better / a little better / all the time” was answered by John Lennon’s sardonic backing vocal, “It couldn’t get no worse!” It’s not technically musical counterpoint, I don’t think, but it’s interplay between voices that deepens the work.