So I leave later tonight for a week-long trip to see A in NJ. We'll probably be going into NYC most days - this means that I'll be happy. I really like New York City; it captures everything that's great about the Garamond font... It's old and proud and artsy and vast. Hopefully I'll be able to get in a proper visit at the St Mark's place record-shops, not to mention The Strand bookstore, Damien Rice at the Bowery Ballroom, maybe some Beethoven at the Town Hall, perhaps even a visit to see Conan O'Brien.

In honour of the flights I'll be taking to get there, as well as the new headphones I'll be picking up (Grado SR-80s, Sony Eggo D66s [more on that another time]), I made myself a couple of mix cds of proper-good listening music. Many of these songs are really long, and never made it onto other mixes because I simply couldn't spare the real-estate. They're great, great songs, though - the use every second of their six-to-fifteen minutes. Somehow I'm finding enough internal fortitude to hold off listening to them till I'm at the airport. I'm worried I'm going to crack.

Burn
01. The Velvet Underground - "Heroin"
The kick-drum continues to floor me. On a good pair of headphones/speakers, it's a thump stronger than your own heartbeat. The way this song rises and falls... the screech of viola... the sadhappy way the lyrics are sung. Hooboy. (I hear it's being used on a Nissan commercial. Ye gads!)
02. Radiohead - "There There"
What a fine first single this is. The drums pick up where Heroin left off, but they dive off the heat-blanched city streets and into the forest. A lullaby that turns loud.
03. Bedhead - "The Rest of the Day"
A blazing example of mellow guitar-playing that crescendos into hazy glockenspiel fireworks. I don't care about the lyrics: they're there to fill time until the seemingly-meandering guitar-line has worked its way into your bloodflow, your inner monologue. When it explodes, it's part of you.
04. Doves - "Pounding"
Trippy, bombastic, feel-good pop as only Doves do. Woo hoo!
05. Loose Fur - "Chinese Apples"
I didn't much like the noodling Loose Fur album. My sister heard this song on Ed, however, and asked me what it was. When I figured it out, what-do-ya-know, it was a lovely little folktune whose merits I had missed. The noodling is present, but harmless. Atmosphere atmosphere atmosphere. And Jeff Tweedy's brown voice.
06. The Microphones - "The Glow Pt. 2"
Noisy and grass-stained - out of disorder comes a clumsy beauty. I like the way the acoustic guitar strokes swing from speaker to speaker.
07. Kepler - "the changing light at sandover"
The Bedhead track's twin. This one changes on a dime, however - like Radiohead's "Creep" - the guitars suddenly thunderous bristling beasts (and the cymbals!). The murmured lyrics have that same irrelevance, though - they're sounds to coax you into the music.
08. Van Morrison - "Madame George"
As Michael Ondaatje recognized, this is one of the world's most marvellous songs, alongside "Sweet Thing" - both from Astral Weeks, and both beyond love, beyond memory, beyond passion and sorrow, well into the sublime.
09. The Dears - "We Can Have It"
It breaks like the sun over the horizon, red-purple. The drums and flute are Radiohead and The Delgados' bastard sons. The finale is huge.
10. New Order - "Temptation"
New Order's best song. Catchy and dancey and singy, with a guitar melody that drives you to grinning, and sillystupid lyrics that sound to me like poetry. The fade-to-snowfall ending sounds like something The Arcade Fire would do, but that's because Win likes New Order so much.
11. Elbow - "Newborn"
If this is prog, it's Dark Side of the Moon brit-prog, muscular and bold. This pop song visits a dozen different places, walks down a dozen different roads.
12. Iron & Wine - "Upward over the Mountain"
Live, from "Morning Becomes Eclectic". This is a song for fog in the streets.

Melt
01. Nina Nastasia - "Ocean"
With its peculiar, in-and-out strings, this song rises like the tide, and crashes against cliffs. Alt.country that justifies the "alt": this is not honky tonk.
02. Sigur Ros - "Svefn-G-Englar"
A submarine that rises through the ice, mist rippling. It's a pop song for orchestras and angels and girls in comas.
03. Songs:Ohia - "The Tigress"
From the live record, mi sei apparso come un fantasma. The song is just as rich as on The Lioness, with the same lurches from angry-to-resigned, but stripped of the organ (replaced with a feral guitar), the track becomes direct, hard-eyed, fierce.
04. Wilco - "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart"
A love-song scattered in the attic.
05. (Smog) - "Our Anniversary"
The best thing off Supper, this song is sentimental in the way that only Bill Callahan knows how to do. Deeply romantic, loving; it's also sad, funny, pure. It takes its time coming home. It looks at the sights.
06. Radiohead - "Paranoid Android"
The first Radiohead song I loved.
07. 16 Horsepower - "Horse Head Fiddle"
Churning, black-taffy atmosphere. Thick as dread.
08. Okkervil River - "West Falls"
A murder ballad that kicks its heels up half-way through, celebratory and unambiguously alive. (I get so much fucking joy out of this band. They are extraordinary. And soon - a split EP with Julie Doiron!!! !!!!!!!! !! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
09. Nina Nastasia - "Superstar"
Don't worry. I won't break my own rules. But this song - which you can download here - is too good to pass up. It's another that slow-blossoms, whose shuffle works its way into your breathing. Plaintive but free.
10. Aphex Twin - "Heroes"
Mad string cut-up of David Bowie's classic. Lush and strange, like Philip Glass on opium. Harrowing.
11. Gillian Welch - "I Dream a Highway"
A green crown. This fourteen minute epic is worth its seconds - it's a song worth living to, to put on repeat into forever. The sound of going home, and leaving it.

See why I'm excited?