April is the Coolest Month

April is stacking up to be an incredible month of music and racing. Follow the links below to hear the tracks that have been released so far from these upcoming records.

Albums set for release in April (ranked by my giddy level):
4/2: Telekinesis -- Dormarion
4/22: Phoenix -- Bankrupt!
4/8: James Blake -- Overgrown
4/9: The Knife -- Shaking the Habitual
4/16: The Thermals -- Desperate Ground
4/2: Caveman -- Caveman
4/2: Flaming Lips -- The Terror
4/30: !!! -- Thr!!!er
4/15: Iron & Wine -- Ghost on Ghost

Races:
4/15 -- Boston Marathon

My first Boston Marathon! In 2010 I qualified at the Monumental Marathon with a 3:10, hoping to run Boston in 2011, but Monumental was a week after Boston unexpectedly filled just 8 hours after opening, so I was shut out. In 2011, they dropped the qualifying time to 3:05, so I ran the Chicago Marathon in October 2011 and qualified again, this time in 2:58. It's been a 2 year wait, but I'm finally going.

Hopkinton, Heartbreak Hill, Wellesley girls, Beardsley vs. Salazar, Boylston, I can't wait to run this legendary course.

4/27 -- Leona Divide 50 Miler

Mountain running! For which I'll be terribly under prepared but who gives a damn! It's going to be a blast. I mean, SoCal in spring, surrounded by top runners vying for Montrail Ultra Cup series points, hanging out with friends I haven't seen in far too long, man this race weekend is going to kick ass.

The course profile makes me want to puke with excitement. Five climbs between 500' - 2000' for a total vert gain of almost 9,000'. I can taste the lactic acid already.

SOD: Dan Deacon -- True Thrush

It's gotten very cold the past few weeks in Michigan. Wind chills in the negatives, plenty of snow, tough running conditions. I had plans to run 100+ miles per week the last two weeks but conditions limited my mileage. 3 hours running would normally garner 22+ miles, but with all the sliding around, I was only getting a fraction of the mileage for the time. 

Mostly it's been fun. Snow is soft when there is good footing, so the downhills are great to blast down. Hardly anyone else is out there, so you have fresh powder to track. I saw a fox in The Arb and deer in Cedar Bend, just me and the forest creatures. The snow dampens all other sounds, so you seem to have the world in your hands out there. But it's tough to keep going. So I've turned to new music to keep me motivated through the 2+ hour runs. 

Along the way, I've discovered Dan Deacon's LP 'America'. Electronic music, not dance necessarily, but with a range of influences and interests, from Philip Glass to Can. I happen to love both ends of this spectrum, so I totally dig his music. It takes on a language and soundtrack that perfectly matches the long, snowy runs that are so much enveloped in your head and at the same time connected with the harsh world around you.

Best Albums + Songs of 2012

It's list making time, my favorite time of the year. This music has made me happy, sad, messed up, introspective, and insane sometimes all at once. I can see some of these shifting places, but it's a good snapshot of bands and recordings that are right on point right now.

Albums:

1. Dirty Projectors -- Swing Lo Magellan
2. Beach House -- Lazuli
3. Cloud Nothings -- Attack on Memory
4. Tame Impala -- Lonerism
5. Passion Pit -- Gossamer
6. Shins -- Port of Morrow
7. Tallest Man on Earth -- there's No Leaving Now
8. Japandroids -- Celebration Rock
9. Metz -- Metz
10. Yeasayer -- Fragrant World

Songs:

1. Lotus Plaza -- Monoliths
2. Langhorne Slim -- The Way We Move
3. Cloud Nothings -- No Future / No Past
4. Beach House -- The Hours
5. Grizzly Bear -- Yet Again
6. Japandroids -- Fire's Highway
7. Tame Impala -- Feels Like We Only Go Backwards
8. Alabama Shakes -- Hold On
9. Dirty Projectors -- Dance for You
10. Passion Pit -- Constant Conversations

SOD: Tame Impala -- Feels Like We Only Go Backwards

I'm crushing so hard on Tame Impala I swear it's not my fault they do this psychedelic 60's throwback production with swinging rhythms and otherworld textures that squeak through my earbuds and take over my brain while singer Kevin Parker sounds, as Jayson Greene says, "like someone trapped John Lennon's vocal take from "A Day in the Life" in a jar and taught it to sing new songs" man that's brilliant and so are Tame Impala is this thing called love?

Lyric Nugget:
I know that you think you sound silly when you call my name
But I hear it inside my head all day
When I realize I'm just holding on to the hope that maybe your feelings don't show

POD: KEXP -- Music That Matters

Looking to break out of your music rut? Tired of the same 10 bands you've been listening to all year? Check out KEXP's consistently awesome podcast of Seattle DJ selected, (mostly) indie bands, many of whom are from the Pacific NW and have been overlooked by the Brooklyn-heavy east coast music outlets. 

That's right, they play bands that might not even have been reviewed or mentioned on Pitchfork yet. My favorite DJ is John Richards, whose selections make me think he goes to a shit ton of local music shows around the country -- and in GB -- and hand selects the best to play alongside the bigger indie rock music of Cloud Nothings, Modest Mouse, Of Montreal, and Japandroids. 

The KEXP website and their youtube channel are other goldmines of live recorded and free video streaming music. 

Download the podcast free on iTunes or here.

Tallest Man on Earth live performance in KEXP studios:

The Perfect Marathon Playlist

Every long distance runner knows that the crux of your marathon preparation really comes down to whether or not you can compose the perfect marathon run playlist.  Forget the intervals you blew off when you were hung over.  Never mind the long runs you couldn't do because you got injured.  If the right song comes on at the right time during your marathon, you will become Haile Gebrselassie.  Wrong song?  You'll spend the rest of the race trying to spell, and then pronounce, his name correctly.

Haile commands, "your playlist shall not suck"

Sure, we list-making/mix-taping marathoners don't have it as bad as they did in the '80s, when runners were locked down by their cassette tapes and walkmen, forced to either listen to an entire song or fumble with the FF button and wait impatiently before guessing where the start of the next song was.  The iPod's click-ability and ample memory allows you to put a bazillion songs on the device and navigate through them, but a sloppy mishmash of songs is still annoying at best and worrisome at worst.  You're not going to look forward to your next song with confidence when you're not sure if you put a string of 25 electronic dance jams on there, especially when right now you're hurting for that filthy Zep riff on "The Ocean".

So how does one compose the perfect marathon playlist?

1. Visualize your marathon.  The race has highs and lows, times to get amped up and times to zone out, times when you need a laugh and times when you sacrifice a few salty drops to the asphalt.  You can't predict these times precisely, but you can set a working soundtrack to your day. 
2. Don't get predictable with alternating fast/slow songs or picking only songs that have 180bpm or whatever.  That will suck the life out of your playlist.  Let your playlist tell a story, let it go for a ride, let it breathe.
3. Listen to your playlist at least once all the way through to make sure it is awesome, but don't listen to it every run or the songs and the tracking could lose their punch on race day.  
4. Don't let someone else (or your ego) make your playlist.  Remember in the Goonies when Mikey says, "this is our time, down here"?  This is your time. And it all ends if you take a ride up Troy's bucket.
5. For the majority of your list, go with the battle tested songs that you love, rather than this week's latest release.  A marathon is emotional, and you need the songs that have been there for you all the way.

This weekend I'm running the Red, White, and Blue marathon thanks to Jon Dix, who unfortunately couldn't run due to injury, but graciously offered to transfer his bib for the race's very reasonable transfer fee.  Thanks Jon, heal up soon!

Here's my Perfect Marathon Playlist for this race:

Animal Collective -- "What Would I Want, Sky?"
Bruce Springsteen -- "Badlands"
Led Zeppelin -- "The Ocean"
Langhorne Slim -- "The Way We Move"
Arcade Fire -- "Keep the Car Running"
Elvis Costello -- "Chelsea"
Japandroids -- "Fire's Highway"
M83 -- "Midnight City"
Sleigh Bells -- "Comeback Kid"
Beastie Boys -- "Sabotage"
Nine Inch Nails -- "Head Like a Hole"
Alabama Shakes -- "Hold On"
Raphael Saadiq -- "Stone Rollin'"
Beyonce -- "Best Thing I Never Had"
Foster the People -- "Pumped Up Kicks"
Stevie Wonder -- "As"
Jay-Z and Kanye West -- "Ni**as in Paris"
The Replacements -- "I Will Dare"
Grizzly Bear -- "Yet Again"
The Clash -- "Rudie Can't Fail"
The Horrors -- "Endless Blue"
Tallest Man on Earth -- "Wind and Walls"
The Walkmen -- "Song for Leigh"
Wilco -- "Art of Almost"
Beck -- "Devil's Haircut"
Bloc Party -- "Like Eating Glass"
The Thermals -- "Now We Can See"
Neutral Milk Hotel -- "King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1"
DJ Shadow -- "The Number Song"
Stevie Wonder -- "I Wish"
The Vaccines -- "Wetsuit"
New Order -- "Blue Monday"
Hold Steady -- "Stuck Between Stations"
Kanye West -- "Stronger"
The Killers -- "Mr. Brightside
Spoon -- "The Underdog"
LCD Soundsystem -- "All My Friends"
Lotus Plaza -- "Monoliths"
Modest Mouse -- "Doin' the Cockroach"
Nirvana -- "In Bloom"
Notorious BIG -- "Things Done Changed"
Outkast -- "Bombs Over Baghdad"
Phoenix -- "1901"
Bruce Springsteen -- "Backstreets"
Sly and the Family Stone -- "Sing a Simple Song"
Radiohead -- "Myxomatosis"
Tool -- "Parabola"
Rage Against the Machine -- "Calm Like a Bomb"
Sleigh Bells -- "Crown on the Ground"