Mix: 45. Fridays In The Park

I’ve got to say I really had fun with this one. Inspired by Ms. Sally’s wonderful recommendation to check out the music of brother/sister duo Sophie and Peter Johnston, I felt compelled to build on an idea for my latest mix for LYL Radio: “What about an hour dedicated to music that takes us back to those simpler times of our youth?”

For me it was during the ’90s when this, your boy full of piss and vinegar, voraciously devoured all sorts of music pumping out of MTV and playing on the air through my mom’s always on radio tuner in the sunscorched border town of El Paso, Texas. Coming of age then seemed to fluctuate emotionally on whatever real or imagined validation I earned throughout my school day. Then (as now) I turned to pop music to provide that soundtrack to my life. As now, then, I turned to using music to share some of my personal experiences with others.

For every “major”, in retrospect, minor event signalling my turn to grow the hell up, find a girlfriend, go outside, and/or play with friends, there was a song, the song, that I can pinpoint to that memory. You could say my first love remains tied to the pop song. Far beyond being instantly accessible, the perfect pop song gets to its pull by instantly finding a way to express universal things like love, hate, and all that in between, through that struggle to explain what the heck all its gradients were. Thankfully, those great pop songs were a shortcut. Keeping it simple simply cut through all those crazy feelings.

In this mix, you get my attempt to imagine a soundtrack for this year’s teen generation, one looking towards a year largely devoid of social interaction, where their whole voyage to experience such innocent times (in a not so innocent era) might come through songs that instantly paint a picture — even if that picture comes through via the barely understable fluctuations of various light emitting diodes on a screen. For those simple times we can afford to sneak away with that certain someone, somewhere where we feel more comfortable in our own skin, here’s a soundtrack to snapshot all that.

You know, first crushes only come around once in our lives.

Fridays In The Park

Tracklist:

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