Mix: 44. Late Summer

Recently, I asked my partner to name the kind of music they’d love to hear play for my next mix for LYL Radio. To my surprise, they simply said: “I’d love to hear more of that hammock music.” Hammock music. I asked them, “What do you mean?”

As a writer and a creative type, I always feel like I should create something with an audience in mind. This mix isn’t any different.

For the longest it’s been my significant other who I thought of as my audience. No matter how far out there I go, in whatever I do, they’d be the one to take their time to follow my other wandering muse (music) and try to contextualize it in the personal language that they know. If they dug a mix or snuck a thumbs up at a certain artist I wrote about — all was right in my world.

At various points they’d cycle in and out, following this site. At various times they’d just cruise around whenever I’d share a mix. Those mixes were reminders of earlier days. Then they’d have periods where they would rather just have me speak to them in person about the music I’m into and go their own way after. These were our connections before this blog existed.

Now Sunday mornings, though, remain the times I treasure. It’s when we can still speak that unspeakable language of self to one another, through music. There is where I develop clear ideas of what a good mix means for the listener.

For them, they hold dear those mixes/music that could afford them a way to escape from everything else. Hammock music, in its kindest definition, meant to them songs that just flowed with ease — as if they belong together. That’s the kind of music they loved to hear and wanted to hear more of. Forget about all the impersonal stuff — give me something I can easily understand.

Writ large, it’s this idea of how seasons segue into each other, how the colors and hues of nature blend effortlessly in change, of how we sometimes struggle to comprehend the simple beauty in this process, that inspired this mix. What is the feeling of summer flowing into autumn?

Now I understand. If everything has a time and a space, here’s my attempt to put a frame to this fleeting moment in time. (Something, I hope, we can all better understand.)

Late Summer

Tracklist:

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