If it’s Christmas at You Ain’t No Picasso, that means it’s Mixmas! These twelve days give me a chance to turn You Ain’t No Picasso over to the musicians I cover and allow them to showcase and talk about some of their favorite songs through a themed mix. This is the fourth year of Mixmas; here’s hoping for many more.

MP3: These United States – Honor Amongst Thieves

I would say this is the year I finally discovered These United States… except that I actually interviewed the band for WRFL back in 2005 before I even knew who they were. But this was the year that they released two fantastic albums and showed us all what they’ve got. And well, I like him so much that I let him ignore the “five song” rule of Mixmas.

“Seven Songs That Spin, Wildly, Freely, in an Edge-of-the-Universe Jukejoint Somewhere Out Beyond the Well-Documented Gravitational Pull of the Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and Vampire Weekend: or, How I Learned to Stop Reading Year-End Lists and Love the Music Again” by Jesse Elliott of These United States

MP3: The Cassettes – Crampbone
These guys are from fucking SPACE. And Europe, and the Bayou, and the Middle East. And also from Times of Yore, and from DC math-core lineage, and the Vaudeville Stage in Mulholland Drive. But mostly from the place where all of these things come together as One. Which is OuterfuckingSPACE, people. If you don’t believe me, then you should a) shut up b) listen to these sonic delinquents c) visit space. Preferably in that order. Any journey, such as This, to There, must begin with The Cassettes… I went to her house at the edge of the wood / Past the falls and the river that became the flood…

MP3: The Childballads – Cheekbone Hollows
(We’re gonna do this alphabetically, see – in part because I’m so deeply in love with every single one of these artists that I could never choose a favorite and in part simply because…) Childballads comes up on my playlist on the heels of The Cassettes – the perfect antidote to the psychic barrage of them previous hoodlums, Stu Lupton sings like… well, see, there’s usually that problem with White Folk singin the blues, as was famously noted, right? – they sing the blues like they’re trying to get into the blues. Stu sings the blues (the existential mood, not the aesthetic genre) like he’s tryin to get out of the blues. His tragedy is thin wild mercury triumphant. When your heart goes boom / my heart goes boom, too…

MP3: Cotton Jones – Lords Of Columbia St.
Please, someone, please, when I die, burn me really good, down to the bone, and shoot my ashes in a rocket into some other Dimension (your choice) as this song plays on repeat on my rocket’s PA system (both inside and outside the craft, if possible) as I slowly, beautifully careen off into the Great Wide Nothing/Next. Delicately, perfectly, and with the most purely contented shit-eating grin you’ve ever seen on a pile of dead burnt human being ashes. Watch out now, my head just drifts among the birds / that’s just how the universe works…

MP3: Deer Tick – Baltimore Blues No. 1
I think this might have come out in late 2007. Who cares? I discovered it in 2008, and this is about me (see: Cotton Jones entry). I’ll still be playing it in 2009, too – I’ll walk down 16th street a few blocks to the White House on January 19th, and as the Gang clocks out at 5 p.m. (3 p.m.? 1 p.m.? when you think they clock out every day?) that final day, I’ll just be sitting outside their door in a lawnchair with an old beautiful gray boombox and a bottle of bad red wine, real drunk, but not necessarily ill-intentioned, blasting John McCauley and co. as I toast their mission gone down in flames and await the great re-birth. Thanks, John. This place is too small to hide /All the ghosts that’s kickin around inside…

MP3: Matt Jones – One Cotton Shot Short
Matt Jones is my new favorite songer-singsunger ever. Probably just my new favorite musician, period. He fingerpicks the meanest electric guitar I’ve ever seen fingerpicked (not in this song, but, you know, permission to speak Randomly?), his voice bobs and weaves, got more whip-smart phrasing than my beautiful 8th grade English teacher we were all secretly in love with (?), hits just the right amount of note and slide. And the way this album is put together, by him and Jim Roll at Backseat Productions, is just a million-piece seamless puzzle of a crystal clear moon-black night on the mountain all alone…breaking day into the glorious accordion sun which’s beaming down to grow up a full-scale Celtic life-affirming death-dirge by the climax of the song. Sweet tooth boy / it’s past or pleasure…

MP3: Adam Matta – Live at Lost Dog
Very live. Completely live. The embodiment of live and living, the ridiculous mad skeels of Adam Matta can really only be appreciated in such a setting. He does everything you’re hearing with his MOUTH. Everything. Even the stuff you think is a drum machine, or an electrical malfunction, or a…swarm of killer bees? It’s not (those things). It’s teeth, tongue, windpipes, nothing more. Slap a loop er two under each other (he’s one of the only folks I’ve ever seen who, Andrew Bird-like, actually makes that mechanism into a worthwhile synergizing excursion, instead of just sonic-space filler), and oH SHIiiiiT WHaaaAA?!?!?! you have A.M.: joy and exuberance and experimentation in its grandest, most genuine sense, personified. Literally. [How you figure I can excerpt these sounds into something approaching lyrics? It all sounds like communication to him, I imagine…]

MP3: Paleo – Pale Blues
There is no way to pick a song out from The Song Diary (released, first, every day, one song at a time, for 365 days from 2006 to 2007 – but then finally, thankfully, properly, as the Whole Mad Intricate Mess, in early 2008). I think that may be part of the point – part of what I see in it, anyway: everything. It overwhelms and confounds. It’s life and life only, but in the opposite order, ending the line with “life.” It could end a life with a line. It could stop a death. I actually believe that. Why not just. Listen closely / Note over note. I have / Stared almost directly / At the human soul…

You Ain’t No Picasso Mixmas 2008
Ivana XL | Henry Clay People