Making a mix for a long drive follows the same basic rules as any other type of tape: 1) Consider your audience 2) Make either track 1 or 2 a universally banging tune to grab attention 3) Pace yourself (don’t peak to early). Yet, the long drive tape also allows for increased freedom/flexibility. A soundtrack for a 12 hour car ride permits elongated songs, enabling alternate, live, or otherwise rare versions of tracks. Also, the long solo plays. Listening to “Whole Lotta Love” from How The West Was Won would fail in most settings, but passing through Las Cruces, New Mexico, you are more likely to welcome the 23 minute live version of the track. I realize that anybody else who may listen to this mix (unrealistic probably), will not share this sort of heightened patience for extended groove tracks, so I omitted the lengthy numbers.

The opener should be self explanatory. The chorus repeats “drive back to your old town/I wanna wake up with no one around”. For those of you who do not know me, I am setting out for Austin on Monday, coming from LA, and having lived in Austin last year, it will be a sort of homecoming. Coupled with the fact that I am moving into a new place - and will likely be “waking up with no one around” (at least for week one) - the chorus of Neil Young’s yammer from Zuma becomes strangely prophetic. I mentioned earlier that either track 1 or 2 needs to be “universally banging”, and perhaps you disagree, but Dylan’s “Outlaw Blues” is my attempt at a unanimously rocking tune. The line “I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James” is unspeakably huge. If you don’t “get it”, move to Canada. Skipping a few, track 6 is my favorite jam from my favorite band at the moment: White Denim “Mirrored and Reverse”. About 3 minutes into the cut, in a beastie boys-esque moment, the sound fades to nothingness, then comes back a few moments later to get the crowd into the last 54 seconds of the track.

And then there is the title of the mix. “Pick your poison” is cliché, but the name comes from tracks 8 and 10. The former is about the bum wine Thunderbird ESQ, and the simplicity of lyricism should be refreshing (front row for The Gories at FFFFest 2010. Who is with me?). The latter is about downing the actually poisonous colorless crystalline alkaloid known as strychnine. Outro courtesy of Ian Curtis & Co, “Dead Souls” is beyond infectious, and the close of the track works well for a late great. I have always understood the chorus “they keep calling me” as Curtis’s way of complaining about how often he gets blown up (called) by the fairer sex. Talk about a song to relate to. words////SN