Tonight, I finish burning. I’ve stalled on this long enough.

YJP subtly reminds me that I neglected to send out the mixcorps 2009 compilations before I left for Denver like I said I would. She is correct – I didn’t get it done in time. I was a furious vortex of fixing IDE tags and forgotten socks right up until the time that I had to haul for the airport. Another contributing factor maybe have been that part of my brain was still holding out hope for the three final & highly important discs from the diaspora (from Chicago, Waltham and Little Rock) that I had been told were en route. I finally got my grubby hands on the first of those today, so now we’re (royally) down to two. Patience is virtuous.

All that said, I’m really pleased with what I’ve listened to so far. For the most part, they’re pretty good. So, soon, soon.

I’m growing increasingly excited about the 2009 mixcorps project. We’re way way overdue on the timeline, of course, my semi-arbitrary deadlines and goals long since passed but entries keep trickling their way in to me. My own mix is getting more melancholic as I tinker, to the point where I’m wondering whether I should re-purpose the stuff I’m cutting out into an up-tempo B-side. I’m expecting to finalize everyone’s entries and ship these out before I skip town next week – if you’re out there hanging on and still want to submit a mix, I think I’m gonna officially call it over and done with this Sunday. So fair warning.

It’s come to my attention that I screwed up the track order, album art and mix name for Baby Baby Baby. Apologies!

From the peanut gallery-

It would have been cool if there were more voting categories/questions – like, which album had the best song you’d never heard? or which album had the best song you had forgotten about? or which album had the worst song that was embarrassingly stuck in your head? Also, i’d have liked to have seen some statistical breakdown of repeat artists/songs on various albums, maybe with a colorful graph. lastly, I also wish that it had been a requirement that people include title and names of the songs on their CDs, you know…for those of us that would want to hear more.

So how about it? Here are a few of my thoughts.

• I had never heard Polite Dance Song from The Bird and The Bee from Mixtape Masters but really liked that.
• The cheesiest song I enjoyed the most was that Elvish/Yiddish/Esperanto version of Blackbird at ~19 minutes into DJ Spam Master.
• I’m embarrassed to say that the song I should have known but didn’t was San Tropez by Pink Floyd off of Workin’ It.
• The best/worst band name I think goes to Tijuana Strip Club off Up Up, Way Down.
• The worst song in the whole project was that Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss crap from Kitshickers.
• The most frequent artist across discs was Ani DiFranco who made it onto three mixes. Jenny Lewis was on two (not including ACL – though she was there too).

If you missed our original poll (and the user submitted poll critiquing the original poll) they’re over here. Please feel free to share your opinions (anonymously or otherwise) in the comments.

Both the southerners told me that mixcorps CDs have arrived despite my selecting the lose-this-package rate. Small consolation, I know, given what went wrong last night, but still, it’s something. I haven’t finished working my way through them myself yet but can safely say this is the first time in the last several decades I’ve had Rod Stewart stuck in my head on my way to work. At any rate, let us know below what you dig. Or just leave snarky anonymous comments further on down.

After a frenzy of last minute coordination, everything mixcorps 2008-related is wrapped up on the San Francisco end. Our twelve times twelve discs have been burned, labeled, sleeved, stacked in cute little color-code bundles, arty-tarted, packaged and done been sent. A gross of golden gosling (?) greatness! As a bonus, I even threw in an extra month’s waiting to build frenzy. Hope you guys like (at least some of) these.

If you have any problems with any of the discs, let me know and we’ll try a digital distribution.

Oh, also. I left these (mostly) anonymized such that your impressions wouldn’t be biased by your hatred for each other. Some folks have asked for a poll-type thing to help validate their own feelings of superiority and while I don’t really think the sample size is large enough, I’m always game for quasitative analysis so will throw one up in a week or so.