I remember wandering under a bunch of half-lit, sputtering fluorescents in the music department of my neighborhood K-Mart, trying to help Mom find a graduation present for my babysitter, Marcia. I’d yet to blossom into a full-blown music geek, but whenever I was out on discount shopping errands and didn’t need to be on hand for a Wrangler’s fitting, I’d wander over to the record racks and judge the quality of bands I’d never heard based on their cover art alone. Iron Maiden ranked pretty high in those days, as did Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but when Mom asked for suggestions on what to get Marcia, I knew exactly where to head. I made a beeline for the E’s and pulled out a glimmering copy of Out of the Blue by ELO. Mom took a look, checked the song titles on the back and asked, “But does Marcia like The Electronic Light Orchestra?” And, while I don’t remember my exact response, I know I irrefutably pointed out with precise, ninja-swift logic that there was a spaceship flying into a gigantic Simon game on the cover, so how could she NOT like it? Mom looked again, noticed it qualified for the Nice Price, shrugged, put down the Air Supply LP she was also holding, and said, “Okay.” I did a little half-spin in the air, the fluorescents crackled and fizzed, and Mom gave me the ELO to carry to the register. I tucked it under the arm of my favorite Space Wars t-shirt, sauntered to the checkout line and handed it to the cashier with pride, knowing I’d made a wise choice on Marcia’s behalf. Listening to it now, with it’s sweet, sweet melodies, glittering production and all-around exuberance, I’d have to agree.

Sweet as a melody by ELO, cool as a spaceship flying into a giant Simon game…

OUT OF THE BLUE:

• 2 oz. aged rum
• ½ oz. fresh lime juice
• ½ oz. ginger syrup
• ¼ oz. Luxardo maraschino liqueur
• a couple dashes of orange bitters
• 8 – 10 fresh blueberries, plus 3 for garnish
• 4 – 5 fresh basil leaves

Muddle the blueberries and basil with the syrup in the bottom of a shaker. Add the remaining ingredients with ice and shake, straining into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with 3 fresh blueberries on a toothpick.

In 2003, I spent enough time rolling my shoulders and jutting my elbows on sweatbox-frenzied dance floors to earn the moniker “Mr. Pop ‘n’ Lock.” Most of these nights were in the back room of a faceless Chicago bar called The Hideout, on an otherwise industrial block just down from a diesel refueling station, where the ceiling was always draped in low-slung Christmas lights and the walls populated with taxidermied fish. On the surface, it was a bad year- radios clogged with war reports, my own brain bogged down with the drone of existential mini-dramas looped on repeat (work life…dating life…blah blah blah). But it was a banner year for dance floors, speakers bouncing out beats by Timbaland, The Neptunes and DFA, all operating at their peak, and the invigorating swirl of genres starting to bubble and blend, exemplified by Outkast on their hip-hop-electro-pop-funk-and-then-some twin discs Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Off the dance floor, life was messy, crammed with stumbles and unknowns, but in that whirling vortex of bodies and bass and humidity-ridden, half-drunk stamina, when the DJ dropped a track like “Hey Ya,” the hardwood floor felt closer to a trampoline, and we all felt our spirits catch hold and burn a little brighter, remembering that, at least for now, it was pretty damn good to be alive.

Twin cocktails for twin albums, both completely spirit-based in the hopes of raising yours…

SPEAKERBOXXX:

• 1 ½ oz. rye
• ¾ oz. Aperol
• ½ oz. Lillet Blanc
• ½ oz. sweet vermouth
• a few dashes of Angostura bitters
• lemon twist for garnish

THE LOVE BELOW:

• 1 ½ oz. gin
• ¾ oz. Aperol
• ½ oz. Lillet Blanc
• ½ oz. sweet vermouth
• a few dashes of Angostura bitters
• lemon twist for garnish

For each cocktail, combine all ingredients with ice and stir, straining into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with the lemon twist.

Nathan was the only kid at camp with a boombox and he’d sit all afternoon on his Dallas Cowboys beach towel, with aqua Chuck Taylors, rainbow OP boardshorts and a big cotton ball stuck in his ear, playing tapes and watching us try to nail backflips off the pier. He wasn’t allowed to swim (something about the ear), and was stuck with a few other burdens that didn’t help much with our adolescent camper crowd- scrawny, myopic, a retainer that didn’t fit his teeth quite right so he had a bit of a lisp, and a cowlick that bobbed like a tiny, half-open umbrella when we walked single file to the cafeteria. We’d make fun of him in the cabin, wait for him to fall asleep, then squeeze half a tube of Aquafresh in his palm, tickle his nose with floss and watch him smear toothpaste all over his sleeping face. But when that boombox was on, he was king. Once we got tired of backflips (or the girls stopped watching us), we’d circle around him, eat grape Laffy Taffys and listen to his tapes. Sometimes girls joined, too, and once Shoshana (of the purple two-piece and strawberry scented hair fame) picked a De La Soul tape from the stack, said she thought the flowers on the cover were pretty and asked him to play it. A few minutes in and Shoshana asked if he had the Dirty Dancing soundtrack instead, but I was sold. When I got home the following week I huffed it on my BMX to Scottsdale Mall, bunny hopped the curb at Musicland and dropped ten bucks of lawn mowing cash on a copy of 3 Feet High and Rising. It was my soundtrack the whole rest of that summer and it’s been there ever since, anytime the sky is hot and sun-streaked and I’m looking for a sound to fill the day.

If it sounds like summer, it should taste like summer, and this one definitely does…

3 FEET HIGH AND RISING:

• 5 oz. ginger beer
• 1 ½ oz. dark rum
• ½ oz. Aperol
• ½ oz. Velvet Falernum
• ½ oz. fresh lime juice
• a few dashes of Angostura bitters
• 1 lime wheel for garnish

Shake the rum, Aperol, Falernum, lime and bitters with ice, then strain into a collins glass with ice. Top with the ginger beer, stir gently and garnish with the lime wheel.

“You said you’d love me forever!” a young woman shouted, her heart peeling apart. “Well, forever changes,” her now ex-boyfriend replied. So went an exchange Arthur Lee had heard about, salvaging a splinter of it for the title of his band’s third LP. The couple wasn’t alone- the whole Summer of Love was heading towards a nasty breakup and Mr. Lee had a clearer view than most, writing a foreboding set of songs in his house perched up in the Hollywood Hills. Released in the midst of the flowing hair and flowers of 1967, Forever Changes was one big party bummer. Naturally, it flopped. The way Love saw it, the sunshine was setting fast behind ash clouds on the horizon and, unfortunately, they were right. Within a year, the flower kids would start to wilt, and the beloved American soil they’d scattered with so many hopeful seeds would spit back bullets, gunning down MLK and RFK, and cracking open the skulls of the young with billy clubs in Chicago. Ominous as it is, though, this record’s also gorgeous, with lush strings and brass adding lift to Arthur Lee’s soaring tenor, lending a little hope to the whole affair. If forever can change, then maybe the bad times can, too.

Like clouds covering a setting sun, but with a little lift inside…

FOREVER CHANGES:

• 1 ½ oz. tequila
• ½ oz. fresh lemon juice
• ½ oz. simple syrup
• ¼ oz. Luxardo maraschino liqueur
• 5 fresh raspberries
• 4 fresh sage leaves + 1 for garnish
• white of a small egg

Muddle the raspberries and 4 sage leaves with the syrup in the bottom of a shaker. Add the remaining ingredients and dry shake (shake without ice, that is) to emulsify the egg. Add ice and shake again, straining into a chilled cocktail glass. Float a sage leaf on top.

Mingus signed to Impulse in ‘63, but the label was a little slow to pay his advance, so one day he walked into the empty office of producer Bob Thiele, scrawled a note along the lines of “Pay me or else” and pinned it to the desk chair with a knife. Accounts payable scribbled out a hasty check and recording sessions began. What came out was a distillation of the man’s own psyche, or, as Mingus himself put it in the liner notes, his “living epitaph,” embodying all the bickering dualities that lunged inside him: masculine/feminine, African/American, lover/hater, crazy/sane (he’d gotten out of Bellevue not too long before), encapsulated in the two opposing figures looming in the title: Black Saint and Sinner Lady. The music follows suit, rolling between extremes of melody and noise, whimper and bombast, compositional control and improvisational fury. All these pairs of opposites, scraping together like sets of scissor blades, lashing out, getting white-hot from the friction, but never able to burn themselves free from the bond that links them at the core, the center inside each of us where all those spastic contradictions meet and make us fully human.

Speaking of dualities, the sweet and the bitter join forces in delicious unity here…

THE BLACK SAINT AND THE SINNER LADY:

• 2 oz. bourbon
• 1 oz. chocolate stout (I used a Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout)
• ½ oz. maple syrup
• dashes of Angostura bitters
• a 2” piece of orange peel with as little pith as possible

Combine the bourbon, syrup and bitters with ice and shake, straining into a chilled cocktail glass. Float the stout on top. Hold a lit match near the surface of the orange peel and, over the glass, squeeze the peel, producing a quick flame and releasing the caramelized oils into the drink (video example here). Rub the peel along the rim of the glass and drop it in the drink.

Who’d bother breaking into my car just to steal some dubbed cassettes? The jumper cables were worth a bit of cash, but there they sat, sprawled out in the back seat like knotted, smirking alligators, smug that they’d survived the raid. Gone were a couple of mixtapes, a hissy copy of Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Mingus, and the one tape that never left my car- a self-selected compilation of all the best songs by The Smiths. Naturally, I was pissed, having lost this document I’d crafted with immaculate pause-button finesse, managing to distill the essence of one of my favorite bands into a 90 minute set. But why steal it? Cassettes were dead, and no pawn shop or record store would mistake my scratchy tracklist for actual artwork anyway. The only theory I could muster was that this guy, like me, was a desperate music freak. Possibly homeless, or at least pushing around a cart full of broken toasters and refrigerator parts, trying to find a bit of that old electric joy in hearing a song for the first time and losing himself in the sound. I wondered what he’d think when he first popped in The Smiths, batteries running low on the Walkman, Morrissey’s voice dropping to a basso drawl, and heard all those songs populated with melodramatic woe, characters wondering how quickly they’d die if they jumped from the top of carnival rides, sullen and smoking in hopes of early death. Whatever burdens they carried through life, they weren’t trading scrap metal for change or scouring supermarket loading docks for discarded lettuce and beans. And yet, whoever stole my tapes had found a reason to go on. Maybe the music was almost enough, and if he had to cop tapes from someone’s dashboard to satisfy the itch, so be it. If I were stuck behind a scrap cart, I’d probably do the same.

Respecting life in cocktail form, heavy on the fruits and vegetables…

MEAT IS MURDER:

• 2 oz. vodka
• ½ oz. dry vermouth
• ½ oz. fresh lemon juice
• ½ oz. agave syrup
• 2” piece of celery, cut into slices
• 1” piece of cucumber, cut into slices, plus an additional thin slice for garnish
• 5 basil leaves
• a few drops of orange bitters

Rub a basil leaf around the rim of a chilled cocktail glass, then muddle with the rest of the basil, celery, cucumber and agave syrup in a shaker. Add the remaining ingredients and shake, straining into the glass. Garnish with the cucumber slice.

Once in the late 90s, I spent an entire night pacing back and forth in my bedroom, trying to perfect a fake Australian accent. I’d developed an internet crush on a girl from Sydney, a painter/designer fond of cats and chamomile tea who played toy piano in a band and wanted to move to New York one day. We’d corresponded for months, through emails with ever-blossoming word counts, and now it was time to act. The plan seemed simple enough- call up her apartment (I’d found her number in an online phonebook), ask for her flatmate in my best Aussie brogue, and discuss the details of a surprise visit. I rehearsed one last “G’day” and dialed. Ring…ring…ring. A young woman answered. “’Ello!” I replied, nerves taking hold, my accent melting as soon as the first words fumbled out of my mouth, til I was more Ringo Starr with a head cold than Crocodile Dundee. I mumbled, stuttered and clumsily caved, finally revealing my true identity to the confused voice on the other end. Fortunately, she found the whole thing charming. A few months later I did make it to Sydney and, yes, the romance bloomed. Were we painfully naïve? Sure, but also wonderfully so, thinking we could find a way to make it work across the chasms of oceans and time zones and long distance phone bills. I have a mixtape she sent me when we were still trying to figure it out, still hoping she’d make it to the States one day. Each side has a Palace song, with Will Oldham’s creaky wooden voice there to remind me of a night in Sydney, lying in her bed draped over with a giant mosquito net. The windows were open, Palace was on the stereo, and we felt secure.

Sweet like a memory, cold like reality, with the hint of a mint julep from Will Oldham’s Kentucky home…

VIVA LAST BLUES:

• 1 oz. tequila blanco
• 1 oz. applejack
• ½ oz. fresh lemon juice
• ½ oz. honey syrup
• ¼ oz. velvet falernum
• dashes of Peychaud’s bitters
• 6 mint leaves, plus 1 sprig for garnish

Muddle the mint leaves with the honey syrup in the bottom of a shaker. Add ice, along with the rest of the liquid ingredients and shake, straining into a rocks glass with ice. Garnish with the mint sprig.

Aretha sings about looking out on the morning rain and I’m right there, too. Not just the window full of clouds, the dripping coffee fumes and the hiss of wet tires in the street. Even more than the dull ache of un-inspiration she refers to in line two. There’s something larger here, some unnameable mass of feeling gathering beneath the surface, and when it starts to rise, I recognize it immediately, even if I can’t quite put it into words. Which is probably why I spend so much time obsessing over all this stuff in the first place- the records, the songs, the whole jumbled alchemy of shaping music out of sound- because when it gets going and it’s really, really good, those moments finally have a name. Not a name with words, but with that sound, the one drawn up from a deep, communal well and shared through some supreme vessel, a voice as all-knowing as Aretha’s.

A drink almost as rich as the voice of the Queen of Soul…

LADY SOUL:

• 1 ½ oz. dry gin
• ¾ oz heavy cream
• ½ oz. sweet vermouth
• ½ oz. homemade grenadine
• ¼ oz. Luxardo maraschino liqueur
• 3 brandied cherries for garnish

Combine all ingredients with ice and shake, straining into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with the cherries on a toothpick.

It’s two in the afternoon and the girl on the album cover is still in bed, staring at her overcrowded nightstand. Ashtray, alarm clock, a plate of uneaten crackers, post-its with phone numbers, a reminder to buy shampoo, directions to a theatre to see about a job painting backdrops. Ask for Sam, the name’s underlined three times, and next to it a small drawing of a mouse sitting cross-legged on a chair. She lights a cigarette, picks up the book lying on her pillow, looks at the cover and puts it down again. The same thought keeps circling around in her brain, like someone taped her head to the ceiling fan. She leans to the floor, puts the record back on, then sits up again, staring out the window, quietly singing along. “How and why and when and where to go? Hmm hmm…” Kids are playing in the schoolyard across the street and one’s off by himself, tossing a stick in the air. It hits the dirt, he picks it up, tosses it again and watches it spin in the sky. Every time it reaches its peak he gets excited, hopping up and down on one leg. Maybe this time it’ll stay there, stuck in the clouds forever. It doesn’t, but he picks it up and tosses it again anyway. And maybe that’s just it. The girl stands, balancing her cigarette carefully on the edge of the ashtray, and opens her closet for something to wear.

It’s sweet, it’s dark, it’s Scottish, it’s a cocktail for Belle and Sebastian…

IF YOU’RE FEELING SINISTER:

• 2 oz. blended scotch
• ¾ oz. homemade allspice syrup
• ½ oz. fresh lime juice
• dashes of Angostura bitters

Combine all ingredients with ice in a shaker and shake, straining into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with candied ginger on a toothpick if you happen to have some.

I was watching roller coasters rise and fall on the horizon over I-94 as we passed Great America when Justin’s Fiero started chugging, sputtering, took a last breath and died. It was the summer of ’95, pre-cell phones, and we didn’t know a thing about cars except how to drive them and pull jammed cassettes from the tape deck with a butter knife. We took a guess, made a quick sign with a Sharpie - “ANTIFREEZE!” - and tried to wave someone down. Eventually we did, got the fluids topped off along with a jumpstart, and the Fiero crept along the shoulder til we got to a Wendy’s parking lot where it coughed, rattled up and died once more. Several payphone dials later, we knew we were stuck for the night, so we ordered burgers and headed back to the car. That’s when we met Scott, in a wilted sweater with a hole in the sleeve, and Randy, in a Clockwork Orange t-shirt and bright blue shorts. They were kicking around a hackey sack, killing time til the next Grateful Dead show in Chicago. We traded stories on the curb, ate Frosties and, several hours later with nothing else to do, climbed into our new friends’ Caprice Classic to listen to some tunes. Justin and Scott talked Buddhism and Quentin Tarantino in front, Randy read sci-fi, and I fell asleep in the back, the wordless voices at the end of “Ripple” sinking into my drowsing brain like a chorus of ghosts huddled round some ancient, fading campfire. Or maybe more like kids killing time under an orange-lit buzzing lamppost in a parking lot just past Great America.

This cocktail’s beautiful to look at and to sip, founded on American rye whiskey…

AMERICAN BEAUTY:

• 2 oz. rye
• ½ oz. simple syrup
• ½ oz. lemon juice
• ¼ tsp. rose water
• dashes of Peychaud’s bitters
• 4 fresh strawberries, tops removed
• 4 large basil leaves

Muddle the strawberries and basil in the bottom of a shaker. Add ice and the remaining ingredients and shake, straining into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.