The December Mixtape

As I get ready to ring in the new year by drinking my face off tomorrow night I wanted to get together the final edition of PHW’s monthly mix series for 2009. Much of December was spent looking back at the best 2009 had to offer, but interspersed throughout a lot of those kinds of posts were a bunch of excellent songs from albums coming out in early 2010. Here’s the best of the bunch, as well as a few older songs that I didn’t get to earlier.

Vic Chesnutt’s “Flirted With You All My Life” starts the playlist off, and it’s a song that has really hit me hard over the past few days since his untimely passing. Unfortunately, while he was alive Chesnutt was always an artist on my periphery, so I can’t put together the kind of eloquent memorial that An Aquarium Drunkard or Muzzle of Bees posted. I knew a few songs from over the years and liked them, but I never jumped in like I now wish I had or like I now intend to do. “Flirted…” is an almost scarily prescient song about always feeling death standing so close to you. As a final artistic statement (from his final LP - At the Cut), it’s simply mind-blowing.

MP3 :: Flirted With You All My Life/Vic Chesnutt (original post)
MP3 :: Even Heroes Have To Die/Ted Leo & The Pharmacists (original post)
MP3 :: Burning Holes/Why Write? (original post)
MP3 :: Left It Alone/Banjo Or Freakout (original post)
MP3 :: Castaways/Shearwater (original post)
MP3 :: Scissor/Liars (original post)
MP3 :: Four Score Part One
MP3 :: Four Score Part Two/Titus Andronicus (original post)
MP3 :: Hide It Away/Retribution Gospel Choir (original post)
MP3 :: Holding Hands/We Are Wolves
MP3 :: Time/Beach Fossils
MP3 :: Boy Lilikoi/Jónsi’s (original post)
MP3 :: We Talk Like Machines/Savoir Adore (original post)
MP3 :: My Proud Mountains/J. Tillman (Townes Van Zandt cover) (original post)

Happy New Year everyone, see you in '10
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See also: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, & November.
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