Something Good #48: A Holiday Gift for You
Years ago, back in the Greater MP3 Era, I would often make mixes for friends, an extension of my teenage mixtape habit, only digital. (I also had a mix-CD period, but it wasn’t as significant.) I’d arrange the tracks in iTunes, spend time on cover art, re-tag the MP3s and then post a link in a Facebook Note (RIP) along with meticulous instructions on how to import the files into your MP3 software of choice and play them in the correct order (important!)
My MP3 collection is frozen in time at pretty much the exact moment I gave in and subscribed to an (evil) streaming service—I want to say around 2012 or so. Recently I decided to offload the ~200GB or so antique music files I had been schlepping around from computer to computer for the last 10 years to external storage, and in doing so I discovered a festive mix I used to post circa the holiday season every year.
This isn’t strictly a mix of holiday music; some of it is explicitly Christmassy, some of it just Christmas-adjacent in my head. It’s a good December listen, so I have ported it over to my (evil) streaming service of choice, and now I would like to share it with you. Sadly, not every track from the original mix is available on Spotify—mostly some really great Studio One tracks from old Soul Jazz compilations. (I’ll see if I can dig them up on YouTube and put them in the bonus tracks section below. Christmas and reggae go really well together for some reason.)
Anyway, you don’t need any particular instructions for this besides: listen and enjoy. (And if you happen to subscribe to any non-Spotify streaming services and want to port the mix over there, please do so with my blessing and send me the link.)
This week’s festive #nojacketsrequired submission comes to us courtesy reader Benjamin Errett. Go read his newsletter Get Wit Quick, it’s excellent. And as always, if you have an unjacketed find to share with the Something Good Substack Universe, please email it to me at [email protected].
Bonus track (I could only find one of the missing songs, but it’s an absolute scorcher):
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