Pandemonium Jones

Free download here via wetransfer

Finally making good on a concept from 2008, I humbly present 110 minutes of my favorite Neil Young songs. I’d started listening to Neil a in the early aughts but only knew a couple key tunes and Tonight’s The Night until, while living on an organic farm in rural California, I uncovered an entire box of his LPs in the stockroom of a near-defunct record store and bought a copy of every album he released up to 1979. (How short sighted! I left a sealed copy of Ragged Glory…)

Simultaneously, I was awarded some sort of free download token on waffles.fm (remember?!) and used it to acquire a massive .zip of his entire official recorded output to date, as well as choice bootlegs like Chrome Dreams. I listened to the vinyl by day, running through whole album sides while there was enough solar power for the stereo, and by night I would sit stoned in the dark listening to the MP3s, often shuffling the entire catalog. Both modes of listening were good for discovery, but as I began to identify more strongly with some songs than others, I decided to compile my favorites into a mixtape so I wouldn’t have to listen to Stupid Girl anymore. I got as far as a fat playlist and some notes on potential sequencing, but shelved the project in favor of more diverse soundscapes.

Neil and I don’t spend as much time together as we did during those heady days of discovery, but recently I’ve been revisiting his output in the process of bonding with my friend and fellow fan Keovi. She expressed interest in making art for one of my mixes and this seemed like the perfect project, so off the shelf it came. Thanks for the inspiration and the awesome art, Keo!