The Loop : Various Artists - Acoustic Christmas 2003

Various Artists - Acoustic Christmas 2003

One by one, with each of theses posts, I start to out-nerd my self. Case in point: I'll save you the story of "I was really poor Senior year of high school and didn't know what to get all of my friends for Christmas." story, but that's how this started. Half inspired by an acoustic cover I had heard of Jimmy Eat World's "No Sensitivity", and my affinity to making mix tapes (seriously, I carried a walk-man until college.), I decided to put together a compilation of acoustic songs as a gift.

And I did just that. I sat down for a few hours at a time and burned approximately 50 CD-R's with 17 acoustic performances or songs that were meant to be acoustic to begin with . I printed off copies of the track list at my Mom's office and took a bag of those and a spindle of CDs to school with me right before break. As you can tell, I get geeked out about sharing new music with people and I was so excited to share this carefully sequenced, mother of all mixtapes. I ended up giving most of them away the first day, and even had people I hardly knew asking if they could get a copy. It was really cool to hear what people thought about it and hear some of my most mainstream of friends raving about the Finch song they heard.

The tracklisting was by no means groundbreaking (see below), but all really great versions of these songs. A lot of these bands meant a lot to me at the time and pre-MySpace, it was cool to find this kind of content organically. I got lucky that they had just released "Punk Goes Acoustic" a few months before, so I snagged a few tracks from there, but the rest were mostly things I found on Napster when I searched "acoustic". I really enjoy the live versions of songs, like Oasis "Slide Away" and Coheed and Cambria "Time Consumer" (you hear some bro talking during the whole set . . . it doesn't get more real than that) It was a turning point for me with Elliott Smith, after hearing "Angeles" over and over while I burned the disc. The Jimmy Eat World song was actually an acoustic demo from a split 7" they had done and I made sure to include the ORIGINAL Dashboard Confessional "Hands Down", as it should be. I also included two "festive" tracks at the end, "Happy Christmas" by Five Iron Frenzy" and "The Hannukah Song" by Adam Sandler.

There's nothing really profound to say. Listening to it again brought back some really great memories of just the careful thought that it took to put it together and how exicted I was to share it. Maybe this year, I'll do something similar. But with less Dave Matthews Band.

Tracklisting:
1) No Sensitivity - Jimmy Eat World
2) I Miss You - Incubus
3) Time Consumer - Coheed and Cambria
4) The Space Between - Dave Matthews Band
5) Trust - Thrice
6) Angeles - Elliott Smith
7) Yr Letter - Onelinedrawing
8) Slide Away - Oasis
9) Creep - Radiohead
10) Cute Without the E - Taking Back Sunday
11) Letter - Finch
12) Hands Down - Dashboard Confessional
13) Looking Back on Today - The Ataris
14) Beauty and the Mess - Nickel Creek
15) A Whole in the World - Thursday
16) Knew it All Along - Midtown
17) Sympathy - Goo Goo Dolls
18) Happy Christmas - Five Iron Frenzy
19) The Hannukah Song - Adam Sandler

Acoustic version of Coheed and Cambria "Time Consumer"
(actual version that was on the compilation, complete with talking bro. Please ignore the cheesy picture montage)