Mixtape | July 2026
Somewhere around the fourth or fifth pass through this month's pile I noticed half these songs are about money. Cheap beer, twenty dollar bills, imitation wood grain, diamond rings, a guy literally wandering around Home Depot trying to price out a life he doesn't have yet. And once I saw it I couldn't unsee it, because the other half of the pile is about the stuff you can't put a number on at all. So that's July. Fair Market Value. What things cost versus what they're actually worth.
It opens with a song called Country Music on a playlist that's at least a third country music, and yes I know, and no I'm not sorry, I don't plan what gets released, and I don't plan on what's going to hit for me. Charley Crockett walks in like he owns the place because he does, and the first stretch is all confidence, Band of Heathens, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Jack White making a racket at track four. Cory Branan closes out the opening run and then Margaret Glaspy pulls the whole thing inward for a few songs, which is the first time the playlist takes a breath, and I wanted that dip to be short and quiet so the middle would hit harder.
Because the middle is the whole reason this playlist exists. Tracks 11 through 18 are where the theme lives, all the cheap things and fake things and small bills piled up in one place. Goodnight, Texas opens the act with The Winter of '68, and honestly I need to say this louder because I love these guys and they never get enough mentions anywhere, they have been quietly making some of the best story songs going for years and I will keep putting them on these playlists until more people catch on. Sitting right in the middle of the act at track 13 is Live It Down by Tyler Ballgame, which I have not stopped playing for weeks. I am fully obsessed with this song. I kept trying it in different spots and it kept pulling everything around it into orbit, so eventually I just gave it the center and built the act around it. The act ends with Home Depot by Medium Build, which for me might be the best placement on the whole playlist, an act about what things cost closing on a song about wanting to build something real.
From there it warms back up. Thee Sinseers and Cory Wong and Leon Bridges bring the groove home, it gets sunnier and smoother through Benny Sings and grentperez, and then Remi Wolf kicks the door open and the last third goes full summer. The actual peak of this thing lands way later than it probably should, Linda Lindas into Fiddlehead into Petey around tracks 32 to 34, and I like that it happens there, right when a normal set would be winding down.
And then it does wind down, on its own terms. Dent May gets nostalgic, Ruby of Thanks and Ian Kieffer keep it low and warm, and Dunsun's I Just Burn closes it out. That one was always going to be the last track. Some songs just tell you where they go.
Anyway. Forty songs about what stuff costs and what it's worth. I might still move two or three of these. Start at track one.
