Yeah, I know, they probably won’t come around again — all that time-looping business tends to screw around with the future — but Steph’s Top 40 Tunes from the 80s contains some seriously good tunes from this era, some big hits, some not so big.

Then again: isn’t “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (#33) the premise of every Smiths song?

SongsAbout.com is “a database of ready-to-use playlists about holidays, current events and interesting topics of every kind!” Even better, they’re posted a little in advance; their Veterans Day selections came out on November 3rd.

The material is derived from the Green Book of Songs^®, offered as a subscription service. They admit up front in their FAQ that they can’t possibly get everything:

Some songs are regarded as, frankly, too complex to full classify in this Database. For example, Emmylou Harris’s “The Pearl” covers profound themes of God and mankind that resist efforts to recognize it adequately. There are numerous other such cases, and we thank you for accepting the inevitable limitations within which this Database operates.

Which statement, modest as it is, was enough to insure their inclusion here.

Tavi Gevinson, who’s been blogging at Style Rookie for four years, has several side projects, including mixes at 8tracks.com. This particular one I found delightful, especially in view of the fact that she wasn’t around for any of these songs when they first appeared. There’s no list attached, but you can read it here.

So far as I know, I’ve never done a 1990s compilation of any sort, and this may have something to do with the fact that I spent much of that decade avoiding record stores and such. Fortunately, Apocalypstick is here to fill the embarrasing gap with an inspiring 24-track 90s mix, and what’s more, she was kind enough to put it up on Spotify. More than this, one should not presume to ask.

A paragraph from Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and … oh, there are loads of rules.

I might actually follow these once in a while, but I don’t make a habit of it.

Since I haven’t had much going on here myself, I’ll point you to “Songs for Tambourine Hands”, suggested by Tiny Mix Tapes, featuring about an hour’s worth of shakin’ action, without once even mentioning that green thing brandished by the Lemon Pipers, which you’ve heard too many times already. It does, however, feature Beck’s “Black Tambourine” (from Guero), which would have offset it nicely.

Liz Enthusiasm and Sean T. Drinkwater of Freezepop suggest this collection of songs that inspired their particular brand of synthpop. As a Freezepop fan, I give it two controller-addled thumbs up.

The major problem with the 80-minute audio CD is that it holds only, well, 80 minutes. (I’ve pushed them to 79:55 or so, but no farther.) You might consider this a serious limitation, bad enough to drive you to record CD-Rs with MP3s on them.

Or you might not:

limiting any collection to 12 or 14 or even 18 songs when you can easily fit 3-400 on a CD-R just as easily can often be viewed as a waste of time. and that’s the problem. the limitations are what lift the act of throwing some tracks together to creating a perfect and timeless mix that can resonate for decades. skeptical that a mixtape can have such a profound impact? i shit you not: books have been written on the subject. the fact is that i’ve received several mix tapes and a few mix cds and i value all of them as highly, if not higher than my favorite albums of all time.

a well-executed mix is like a book: it has an introduction, a middle, an end. it tells a story (even if that story is: here’s a cool band i like), has a rise and fall and usually has some twists and turns you don’t expect.

And how much of a story can you tell if you throw in three hundred tracks? This is Proustian overkill when you need Hemingway’s conciseness.

It was much different when you had to work with cassettes:

The art — and make no mistake about it, it is an art — of making a mix tape is one lost on a generation that only has to drag and drop to complete a mix. There’s no love or passion involved in moving digital songs from one folder to another. Those “mixes” are just playlists held prison inside an iPod. There’s no blood, sweat and tears involved in making them.

There would be albums strewn about the room. There would be painful minutes spent starting and stopping and restarting a song in an attempt to hit the record button at just the right time so as to eliminate the clunks and hisses. But even if you didn’t time it so perfectly as to not have even a millisecond of space between “Don’t Cry” and “Jamie’s Crying” it was ok. That hiss became part of the mix. Upon the third listen, that sound would no longer be a piece of imperfection, but part of the flow of the tape; the two seconds of dead air was a metaphor for the silence in your relationship.

This latter is important: we cherish the imperfections.

The Troggs’ immortal “Wild Thing,” issued by two labels in the States (Atco and Fontana) because no one was quite sure who actually owned the US rights to it at the time, contains a very noticeable board click right before the beginning of the last section. Reg Presley croons “You moooove me,” and the sound fades away: you can count your way into the next guitar blast, but before you get there, somebody hits a switch, and it’s easily audible. Admittedly, “Wild Thing” is pretty noisy on its own, but if that board click is missing, you’ll know it.

Clip from “Wild Thing” [mp3]

At least one reissue producer took pains to “clean up” that record, and he excised the board click entirely. The results were Not Good.

Still, good transitions are worth trying for. The greatest segue ever, I have believed for some time, would be from Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” into Badfinger’s “Day After Day,” and it has to be timed just right. Modern-day DJs can hit this beat without even breathing hard, but it takes a little longer for us old Luddites, even with spiffy software at our disposal.

With the departure of Noel Gallagher from Oasis, ShortFormBlog is recommending this five-song set, including four Oasis tunes on which Gallagher sings and the Chemical Brothers’ “Setting Sun.” As usual, SFB has linked the whole thing to the online store at lala.com, making acquisition of these tracks much simpler.