SFTL

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - “Carpe Diem, Moonman” & “Pogo Rodeo”

Swans - “Birthing”

Honningbarna - “Soft Spot”

Lady Gaga - “MAYHEM”

Hayden Pedigo - “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away”

While I have been tangentially-aware of Hayden ever since he ran for city council in Amarillo and because he pops up semi-frequently in subreddits that I haunt, I never took a legitimate chance on his music until this year, after learning about his collaboration with my current fave Chat Pile. I’m so glad I finally did indulge in his back catalog ahead of that release, however, because I learned very quickly that this kind of somber, atmospheric, and lyrical guitar work is perfectly suited for someone like me. As a guy who got REALLY into early ambient and dark ambient music in my early twenties, and used that genre space as my gateway into post-, prog-, and avant-garde rock/punk, it feels like listening to Hayden’s American Primitivist pieces takes me full circle. There’s definitely a lot of the southwest (and the folk traditions that it inspires) in his music, but also a lot of influences from those same boundary-pushing genres are evident too. It also really helps that his thoughtful, beautiful pieces inspired by the Amarillo landscape he grew up in fit perfectly as a soundtrack to my own life in this moment, wherein I’m relocating from one desolate landscape made up of concrete (DFW) to another that more closely resembles the flat, empty beauty of his hometown (central Illinois). So to see him and Chat Pile explore a synthesis of those two aesthetics in their collaboration really makes me feel like their music is being written and released exclusively for me. While I’m primarily featuring his 2025 release here as a year-end call-out, I’d highly recommend exploring the other two records in his trilogy with Mexican Summer. All three are stunning works of beauty, and I can’t recommend them enough.

The Most Universal

An SFTL mixtape.

Apple Music • Spotify

“More Universal” was not the first mixtape I made for SFTL, but for whatever reason it’s the one I am the most fond of. It was a standard, 10-song grab-bag running about 45 minutes in length, with a vibe/intent as amorphous and hazy as its cover. Seriously, what was this thing? Was it just a bunch of my favorite selections from the blog? Was it a fall mix? Maybe a zeitgeist ‘indie-head hits of the moment’ type of thing? Heck if I know, and I made the damn thing. I listened to it a TON too, typically during bus rides to school when there wasn’t anything else catching my ear. After about a year of doing so I iterated on the original list and released a sixteen track version called “Even More Universal.” Years later, after creating the Spotify account, I revisited that mixtape often, either while closing up the coffee shop or taking one of my daily five-mile walks. Now that I’m dabbling again in this stuff, and being twice as old as I was when I made the original, it feels appropriate to once again revisit it. I approached this third iteration as if there was a version of me that never left/abandoned SFTL, and had kept adding his favorites-of-the-moment and rearranging the lineup in what has become a never-ending-tinker-tape. The result is about three times longer in runtime, but still adherent in spirit to what I can only imagine was sixteen year-old Adam’s vision for the original. Having listened to this in enough different settings I can confidently say that at the very least it still goes great with a morning bus ride or an afternoon walk during autumn.

While the original “More Universal” tracklist is lost to time, “Even More Universal” will remain available on both our Spotify profile and my Apple Music profile for those who are interested.

all this happened by takin’ your hand

An SFTL mixtape.

Apple Music • Spotify

A long time has gone by since I first started this mixtape. The formal process started in May, but I feel like I started this project the first day I got into my future wife’s truck, Rickety Cricket (may he rest in peace), on the way to get Weinerschnitzel together in Mesquite for the first time. Loving someone means entering and falling in love with their world. You’re deciding to take a dive into this entirely different way of seeing and experiencing things, an entirely different history that predates this moment right now, in Rickety Cricket. When we took off my wife put on a playlist of her favorite country songs, a big rotation of talented and varied artists with whom I’d soon become very familiar. My exposure to (and opinions of) this genre before her would be described as incredibly pedestrian: I had those two great Ray Charles albums, a couple standards from the first half of the century, and a handful of 50s and 60s classics (I knew “El Paso,” I wasn’t the most city of city boys!). That alone constituted the entirety of my ‘country knowledge.’ She opened my world with her music, showing me a thing or two about so many aspects of this rich, truly American, genre and its history: she showed me the sparkling beauty of 90s country hits, actual Americana standards that weren’t just featured in Fallout, red dirt and outlaw classics, and best of all she’s exposed me to the standard-bearers of this current generation: the Kacey Musgraves, Orville Pecks, and Tyler Childers of the world; such a stark contrast to Morgan Whalen or Jellyroll. This mixtape is intended to be a roadmap of where I’ve gone with her so far, both programmed and arranged in collaboration with my wife. The selection has a lot of my heart and hers in it, intermingling and in conversation with each other while exploring every aspect of what makes country so great of a genre. I love this mixtape; it’s the ultimate road-trip mix, it’s this a prismatic showcase of the multi-generational talent of the genre, but also it’s a bit of a radio-play about where she and I have already been and where we’re hoping to head together into the future. In particular I think the interludes in this (her idea!) make this one stand out as one of my favorite projects that I’ve had a hand in making during this era of SFTL so far. I really hope you give it a listen.

“On Vinyl”

An SFTL Compilation

Apple Music • Spotify

Today is the 17th birthday of SFTL. That means this blog is now older than I was when I first started it. It admittedly went through a very lengthy dry spell between 2016 and 2024, and its content output even in this ‘rebirth’ era doesn’t even come close to the post frequency of the blog in its peak. Back in the day, before accepting that putting out direct downloads of music without rights-holders’ consent was probably a bad idea, I put out compilation ‘mixes’ of the blog’s featured tracks in a series called On Vinyl. I decided to commemorate the occasion of today I’d resurrect that series in the form of the never-ending playlist you see here.

The work to make this thing was painstaking, and I took the opportunity to re-read every single post ever written on this website while manually adding each song to this playlist. What did I learn or glean from this exercise? More than everything else, I was constantly reminded how great of a writer Crystal was on this site. I may have started it, Austin may have designed it, and the other writers were all great in their own right at contributing their wide spectrum of perspectives and tastes (Anne! I miss your posts and your taste so much!), but Crystal was the heart and soul of this thing for a majority of its lifetime. While I would come and go – and there are some moments where it’s obvious that I was going through some stuff when I did show up – she kept the dream alive with her consistently great takes, consistently great taste, and later through her active and engaged leadership. It’s no wonder that she found kinship with so many others in the music community and ultimately became a contributor on bigger and better publications. I am honored to have shared such a special little project for such a brief time with her, and the rest of the great writers we featured on here. I had so many brief episodes where I wanted nothing to do with this thing, and I regret every single one. Reading back and also seeing how on the fucking pulse we were in our best years reminds me that this wasn’t just a silly little tumblr blog, it was something to be proud of.

Instead, for a large chunk of this thing’s seventeen-year lifespan I treated it like something I was too good for, like blogging was beneath me despite being so passionate about my baby when I first created it. Believe it or not I sometimes debated nuking it and erasing its history completely. I’m so glad I didn’t because now I’m thirty-three and for the first time in a decade I am eager to talk about my favorite music again. I’m eager to take a big handful of what I am vibing with, recontextualize it, and ask others to see the music I love in the same way I do. Maybe right now that’s primarily in the form of (chronically delayed) mixtapes, but don’t be surprised to see an album or track review pop up in your feed here and there too. After spending nearly two decades battling depression I’m choosing to finally take a different path; one where I don’t worry what other people think and I don’t look down on a music blog just because we’ve moved so far past that sort of thing’s relevance. This is more about me than it is about you. I’m posting here for an audience of one, and that’s okay because he’s my biggest fan and I don’t want to let him down.

👊🇺🇸🔥 Right Side B-Sides

An SFTL mixtape.

Apple Music • Spotify

I’ve been working hard on a couple of mixtapes simultaneously but unfortunately I wasn’t able to get one fully baked out of the oven in time for May. So instead, I’ve decided to lightly reorganize and packaged/publish my “B-Sides” playlist for The Right Side of History. There were a lot of directions I took on that mix, but ultimately I settled on this cinematic, multiple movement structure that was really fun to see come together. In the process of organizing and reorganizing and listening to it over and over, I had to kill a lot of tracks that I felt really passionate about, and (most of) the rejects ended up in this playlist. I hope it gives you some additional inspiration to rise above this right-wing disgrace that we’re all sentenced to endure. It’s a little rough, but that’s what happens when you spend an afternoon on a mixtape instead of literal months. I promise I’ve got a pretty jaunty one lined up for June (fingers crossed), and hell it’s a stretch but maybe I’ll manage to get two out in a month. In the meantime I hope you all enjoy the weekend.

wyb?

An SFTL Mixtape.

Apple Music • Spotify

This one has been a long time coming: the fourth entry in my old ‘hip hop diary’ series which I (cringe) originally titled The White Boy’s Beat. When I was seventeen and spending time on this blog every day I was still incredibly green and under-exposed to hip hop, a natural result of where I lived and who I typically hung around at school. It was thanks to this blog (namely, my much more cultured friends who wrote for it) and my incredibly online obsessive gremlin behavior that I began to break out of that sheltered suburbia mold. Early on in this journey I wanted to document snapshots of my taste evolving along the way. The first two entries are still on our Spotify page, and the difference between what I listened to then and what I listen to now is staggering, to say the least. From what I remember of the track list from In The Streets, the forever-lost part 3, I had only just started truly getting up on game with old school nineties acts like Wu-Tang after copying a ton of records off my aunt and uncle’s old iPod. That was fifteen years ago, so when I resolved to make a part 4 I wanted to try and encapsulate my entire journey between then and now. Since then though hip hop has skyrocketed in the rankings to become my favorite genre of music, so it has proven hard to fit all of the different eras of my taste into one mixtape. Heck, I had to completely leave off selections from my ‘trap era’ and from that brief period where I was enthusiastically bumping Rae Sremmurd. Don’t think most would consider that much of a loss, though; at least I don’t. I have worked this thing to death for like five months to get it ready for others to hear, so I hope it hits the way I was going for. I know hip hop mixtapes, whether they’re curated or generated, are a dime a dozen and I appreciate anyone who gives my little two hour project here a chance. While I can’t make any promises I’ll try my best to get the next one out to y’all a little sooner than a decade and a half next time.

The Right Side of History

An SFTL mixtape.

Spotify • Apple Music

Hey we made you a mixtape. Remember those? I’ve been dabbling as of late and after the beginning of the end started in November last year I have found myself leaning more and more on music to cope with the state of the world. COVID really radicalized my worldview, and it seems like every successive year since 2020 has just been a big fat dump of kerosene onto the fire of revolution that burns in my heart. Heck, the other title for this when it was a wee 20-track work-in-progress was “A Soundtrack for Destroying Private Property.” When you explore the movements and diversions of this varied track list I think it will be all-too-obvious that those thoughts and some even darker urges were on my mind. I’m not going to pretend that my two-hour mixtape is going to end the threat of fascism and free us from this capitalist hellscape but I do hope that at least some of these incredible artists’ words inspire some of you to do more to stand up to the evils that liberalism is clearly ill-equipped to address. In these increasingly dark times, all we have is each other. That, and music.

Genres: Folk/Americana, Punk, Hardcore, Metal, Hip Hop, Riot Grrrrl, Folk-Punk