Now available: Everybody's Saying Music Is Love!

Our full holiday mix of classic South American pop music is now available for download. Click here or on the picture on the right. Artwork and everything is included. Happy Holidays!

The back cover:

The full tracklisting:

SIDE ONE
1. Persons and Faces : We All Together
2. El Pino y la Rosa : Los Shakers
3. Mañana : Totem
4. Jerusalem : Ana y Jaime
5. Te Recuerdo Amanda : Victor Jara
6. Everybody on Monday : Laghonia
7. Maybe I Know : Monik
8. No Tengo Idea : Almendra
9. Siempre Tu : Los Shakers
10. Navidad En El Peru : Coral Infantil Colegio de Chiclayo

SIDE TWO
11. La Pata y el Pato : Climaco Sarmiento y Su Orquestra
12. Mi Cueva : El Polen
13. Profecia : Vox Dei
14. Meshkalina : Traffic Sound
15. Green Paper (Toilet) : Pax
16. It's OK : Telegraph Avenue
17. La Quebra' del Aji Corre Que Te Pillo : Los Jaivas
18. Estamos Seguros : Los Delfines
19. Stone : Texao
20. Lo Más Grande Que Existe es el Amor : We All Together

More facts and figures:

-- In the end we picked from about 500 tracks. We picked songs from Peru (especially), Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. We also considered songs from Venezuela, Paraguay, and Bolivia. We didn't consider Brazil because that's a whole different kettle of fish!

-- We All Together, Laghonia, and Monik are related acts. Different iterations of much the same personnel.

-- Monik's Maybe I Know is a faithful cover of Lesley Gore's 1964 hit. I think that the cover improves on the original, which is a little sterile for me.

-- The cover art is taken from all the different photos posted on the blog over the last year.

-- The refrain "Everybody's Saying Music Is Love" will be familiar to those of you who attended the wedding in August.

-- The sound quality is pretty mixed. We apologize for the tinny mp3 vinyl rip sound on some of the tracks, but these songs simply aren't available around here in any other form. It's sequenced to be not too jarring.

-- There's one Christmas song on the mix. The song title gives away which one that is!

-- There's one other song that's not really in a pop/rock idiom: La Pata y el Pato, a cumbia from Colombia. Think of it as a short, sweet palette cleanser.

-- The first half is more pop, second half more rock.

-- If you're on Facebook you can join our blog group. To be honest I don't know what the purpose is either!

-- There's really only one ballad on the mix, Te Recuerdo Amanda, Victor Jara. It might be his best-known song. It's also one of the most beautiful songs out there.

-- Vox Dei is the longest track at seven and a half minutes. It's also the prog-iest.

-- The last track has been featured on the blog before. But since I got that song from another blog, and that blog had the name slightly misspelled, I hadn't been able to get a good recording of it, until one day I realized it wasn't "Los Mas Grande" but "Lo Mas Grande"! It's fixed on the mix.