In a new sort-of continual/long-term/occasional project that doesn’t consist of me just inundating you with albums that I think are cool, I’m going to start a learning project. When I was in high school, I used to listen to nothing but techno and shoegaze. While there may have been a random PJ Harvey or Chris [...]

I can’t really explain why I love Jordan Eldredge’s “one word off” song experiments so much, but I do. They defamiliarize really common songs in a way that makes us hear them completely differently, and even subtly changes their meaning.  I took these from his original blog posts here and here.

It’s tough to keep the momentum going, you know? Back when this website started,  I was going to have a full-fledged column, and it was going to be called Justify My Love, and I was going to post 3 or so mp3s and talk about music I like and stuff.  That happened exactly once.  Luckily, [...]

“Love is in the air” this weekend, can’t you smell it…wait, maybe you should change your socks.  Yeah, that’s better.  Oh yeah: Love… Valentine’s Day brings out mixed emotions in me: spite for the commercialism foisted upon us meeting my actual belief in love, it’s a generally confusing and often galling time of the year [...]

WTF? Is it covers week at Mission Freak? Well, after getting all giddy about Chris Perdue’s cover of Joanna Newsom’s “Emily” we thought it would only be right to unleash this other fine nugget we came across. At the end of 2007, Bay Area/NYC rock band the Blacks, dropped a cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Back [...]

I can’t lie: since living in Spain some years ago, I’ve had a tremendous affinity for all aspects of its culture. So on this wintry mix of a night in Iowa City, I feel obligated to bring you the exuberant pop of El Guincho, a single dude named Pablo Diaz-Reixa out of Barcelona (for the [...]

This week has been defined by two things for me: Randy Newman and sweet girl pop. And, in one extremely rare instance, the place where those two things collide. We usually sneak some mp3s into the bottom of our articles, but today I felt like flipping the script. So how about an occasional column called [...]