Remembering 2014 In Music - Travel Write Sing

Her lyrics are endearingly lovely—like baby bunny rabbits, nestled near lambs, next to hamsters, wearing tiny sweaters.

Somehow and AP reporter found her way onto this site, and this year these music mixes and the idea behind them was published as a feel good story all over the press wires with Sharing Music: A Personal Gift Made Easy by Tech.

If you’re new to the mix or recently lost all your memories but kept your email address, then my holiday music mix is a way for me to share with you what my year sounded like.

Unlike 2013, in 2014, I have yet to accidentally burn the hair off my right leg, so it has truly been a blessed year. Whether or not we got to hang out and clink glasses or spill wine, thanks to family and friends for continually giving me an endless list of reasons to get up in the morning, throw the curtains and sing “The hills are alive with the sound of music!”

At the start of this month, my new book, The Nomad’s Nomad, finally came out! A lot of the year was spent putting this together, which ended up being a lot more work than I had intended and caused me to put off disappearing for a while in Asia until 201 But now 2015 is just around the bend and the book finally came out and everything is grand. Thanks to everyone who’s checked it out and the encouraging feedback I’ve received from some of you!

If you like ice-cream, you’ll love this book.

2014 Music Mix

The Gabe Dixon Band – Five More Hours

You know how it is, you’re in the car, you got the window down, the coffee stain on your crotch is drying, the wind is blowing through your hair—you’re thinking about where you came from, imagining the arrival to wherever you’re going—all you need is a good highway jam to sing along with. This year my highway sing-along-jam was “Five More Hours.” I dare you to play it in your car with rolling landscapes flashing by without singing. If the sun is shining as you drive, pop your shirt off—don’t be afraid, they may laugh at your hairy chest, but really, they’re just jelly.

Deb Talan – Saturn’s Light

Okay, I need to be honest with you. I wrote this list backward. So while this is probably the second song you are reading, it is the penultimate one I am writing, and I am thinking that I should probably throw some death metal into this list, because it’s turned out pretty light and skippy this year. But some years you skip through. Anyways, the artist I was jamming to most of the year in January 2014 was Deb Talan. Her lyrics are endearingly lovely—like baby bunny rabbits, nestled near lambs, next to hamsters, wearing tiny sweaters. I love putting her music on during my morning writing sessions, because the glow she puts into her music (and I suspect her life) shines easily into a listener’s life and adds some order to my daily forays into rhetorical chaos. Marry me, Deb Talan!

Taarab – Pole Bibi

Imagine, grown-ass American men dancing around the house in Guatemala to African tribal music. While my roommate in Guatemala will deny he danced, will claim that he just sat in a chair and enjoyed the music while I danced, I say you danced, Dan! This is a Swahili song from a group that writes music to go with tribal dances and “Pole Bibi (Swahili for “please baby”) has an electronic melody rift that leaves the listener unable to sit still. This song is 17 minutes long because it’s written to last for the duration of a traditional dance. I would tell you what some of the lyrics mean, but my Swahili is at such a level that all I can say is that sometimes they say the word “now” other times they say, “please,” and several minutes later they say, “Street.” And sometimes they sing, “Name” surrounded by a bunch of other Swahili words that probably mean something. That’s all I got. This song is epic.

Ennio Morricone – Falls

Ever desire to be deep in the woods enjoying the incommensurate thrill of nature’s trills, but instead you find yourself at Walgreens deciding which nasal decongestant you should buy? Anyone who’s been on the Internet can likely relate to this experience. My friend J. Martinez is always slipping me tracks of new music and she sent me this one. To the woods, this song takes me. To sheer stone cliffs overlooking a pastoral masterpiece, this song brings me. To that deep dive into our primordial past, this song leads me. To going overboard with descriptions of it, this song coaxes me. . . It starts all slow and sweet, like a butterfly massage. But then, suddenly, you’re being massaged by a falcon whose shaking you with his talons asking, “Do you understand?” And you think you do, but do you?—you have no idea. You wonder if maybe the answer to the falcon’s question is something so profound that to understand it would be to offend the question to the point that he hurls his question mark into a stream, ending the sentence instead with those dreamy ellipsis points . . .

The Tallest Man On Earth – Little River

I have a run in Guatemala that I call “The Suicide Devil Wtf Death Run.” You could probably handle it, but your grandma would likely need to be removed from the mountain by helicopter. Grandma can’t go straight up a mountain like that, she just wasn’t built for it. I used to run it by pushing. This year worked on running it by letting go. Next year I hope to answer WTF that means. On my 2014 stint in Guatemala, “Little River” was budding in my ears with that damn mountain on my horizon. Since I’d used up my question marks early on last year, I didn’t even try to ask what it is about this song that sticks me like a post-it note carrying a victorious phone number. There is something about the image of a fallen log dreaming of “a little river to the golden ground” that stirs up the silt.

Xavier Rudd – Follow The Sun

As if getting a new wool manbag was not thrilling enough in 201 a bit of romance struck like a ruler on bad penmanship in the 1950s. Blame it on an island on Lake Nicaragua where a lovely Australian said, “Hola,” and I was all like, “Hola to you too.” The heart wants what the heart wants, mostly blood, but sometimes someone else. Sparing the details of how it began and why it ended, let’s simply say that she was the type of person who when you parted ways you were the better for having had a chance to share the air with her for a time. She introduced me to this song, and I think I’ll be inviting this one to stick play on the various speakers that will be hosting my playlists in this country and that.

HEK – Last Cigarette

Last winter, I went to Iceland. This year, Iceland’s self-crafted 21st Century Beat, carrying the the flame ofKeruac, Haukur Emil Kaaber HEK joined me for some shows in NYC and a Midwest Tour organized by Julianne Mason and her guitarist at the time, Tom Hoy. Both are currently pursuing solo projects in NYC that my ears anticipate. For much of the summer, I expected that in August I would be shipping off to Uganda for the next year to work with the Phoenix Orphanage Organization in Mityana, Uganda. I was a finalist for a grant from a lovely program, Arts Connect International. Their funding would have enabled me to live there and implement some programs in an orphanage I brushed shoulders with in 2013. In the end, I was not awarded the grant, but a very wonderful initiative was. Life has a wonderful way of working out regardless of which road you take. Sarah Red and Andrew Bui, whom I met when he was leading a EWB program to Guatemala, took up the torch and have helped the orphanage through a difficult funding situation. At the time of this posting, both Sarah and Andrew are in Uganda now. They have worked to secure funding and offered lessons on best practices and organization management to the founder and director of the orphanage, Ian Mag.

Back to the tour… One of Hek’s crowd pleasing songs was “The Last Cigarette” which was especially relevant for me this year, since at 29 I did the silly thing of picking up a smoking habit I didn’t kick until October. I blame it on an island in Nicaragua. If you enjoy this song, Hek, like most people who wear cool hats, is a starving artist, so feel free to check out his album, “Please Tease Me” He’s on Spotify too, and in the last year has earned $0.07, which he says with an elfish grin is, “better than earning nothing on Spotify!”

Travel Write Sing Tour Jam – Beautiful World

One of my favorite nights of the tour (and life) was when we were all a six pack or so deep into beer and we crowded around a microphone and jammed on this little ditty written while walking in New York on a sing-songy sunny day in March. I didn’t want to lose the jam, so I recorded it into my iPhone by pretending to be talking to someone on the recording app of my phone.

Townes Van Zandt – To Live is to Fly

I’d been a casual listener of Townes van Zandt, but a songwriter from the band Crystal City, Dave Helmer, really turned me onto him this year when our little rag-tag tour passed through his base in Iowa City and my body crashed on his basement practice room couch. Zandt’s song “To Live is to Fly” has accumulated 139 plays on my iTunes since September, surpassing even Enya and her crystal melodies. As someone who’s currently life has settled into a recurrent pattern of “goodbye” and “hello” this song was my jam this year. “We’ve all got holes to fill / And those holes are all that’s real / Some fall on you like a storm / Sometimes you dig your own.” Right!? Sing it Townes!

Joe Purdy –Brand New Set Of Wings

Once upon a November while I was polishing up the manuscript of “The Nomad’s Nomad” in San Francisco when Pandora played Joey Purdy. 8 downloaded albums later, I realized I had a Joe Purdy problem. But really, he’s just a wonderful alternative to silence. If I go deaf this next year, you know why. It’s because Joe Purdy is blasting in my ears all the time. I cannot get enough.

True or false: If I could make a deal with the devil and absorb Joe Purdy’s soul (and by extension, his song-writing ninja skills), I would? I refuse to answer that question. How dare you ask me this question! What kind of question is this?

I am at a lost as to what song to include in my mix, because they are all so good. If Bob Dylan, a forest, and a 17th-century sailing vessel all had a baby, he would grow up to sing songs Joe Purdy’s music. His track “Brand New Set of Wings” makes me feel like this:

Paul Simon – Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall

Paul Simon: “And so I’ll continue to continue to pretend that my life will never end” Lyrically, this song played some heart chords, and liver chords, and kidney chords, and spinal chords, and ankle chords (are there ankle chords?), and knee chords, and elbow chords (yes, of course there are ankle chords!).

Paul Simon: “Through the car doors of sleep. . . ”Awesome Lyrical Prose: Sing it, Paul!

This Is The Last Time – Stars

Originally Xavier Rudd had another track on this list to close it out. Well Xavier, sorry to break your little heart, but you’ve been booted because The Stars track “This Is the Last Time” came flying out of the backfield and onto this list. These guys could rock velcro socks off a panda bear, and they’ve been in my ears for a while. While it took me some time to warm up to their latest album, “No One Is Lost”, it eventually caught flame for me.

Till next musical year!

-LMA