This week Melville, a Portland band Bend fell in love with when they played The Horned Hand last summer, opened a couple of shows for The Autumn Defense—the divinely crisp pop rock side project of Wilco bassist John Stirratt and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone.
As hard as it is to write, produce, record and tour in support of albums, many artists, like Stirratt and Sansone, brim with so much creativity they have little choice but to fill limited down time by experimenting with other collaborations. That’s what this mixtape is about.
Beginning with the aforementioned Wilco and The Autumn Defense, each sonnet of back-to-back tracks is an example of an artist’s central project followed by a secondary one. Whether it’s the alt-pop of James Mercer’s The Shins giving way to the spacey synth rock of Broken Bells or multi-instrumentalist and producer of sonic folk outfit Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor flirting with R&B as CANT, this playlist focuses on the incessant need of these artists to make other music.
