Here’s a bonus August mixtape inspired by the music our family listened to while driving around Oahu last week.

I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

This is the mix I really wanted to make for August, but I needed to go to the island first to make sure everything worked. (“Make Time Stop” should’ve been the September mix!)

SIDE A

– Richard Myhill, “Hawaiian Link”
– Janet Kay, “Silly Games”
– Heimo Rhonda, “Sunshine in Hawaii”
– Haruomi Hosono, “Saigono Rakuen”
– Raymond Scott, “Vibes & Marimba”
– Benjamin Rogers, “On a Coconut Island”
– Dominique Demont, “Un jour avec Yusef”
– Paul McCartney, “Ram On”
– Roedelius, “Wenn der Südwind…” (snippet)

SIDE B

– Señor Coconut, “Showroom Dummies”
– Martin Denny, “The Enchanted Sea”
– Harmonia & Eno, “When Shade Was Born”
– George Kulokahai and His Island Serenaders, “Aloha Oe”
– Raymond Scott, “Portofino 2”
– Gaussian Curve, “Impossible Island”

This tape was trimmed down from a 2 1/2 hour playlist I had on shuffle as we drove around the Windward Coast and the North Shore. The best way I’ve found to make a “vibes” playlist is to dump a bunch of stuff in there, and put it on shuffle, and anything that doesn’t fit, you just delete it as you go. 

When it comes to making an actual tape, however, I think you just have to start with the song you want to start with on side A and do one track at a time. (I was going to start with “Ram On” — it was really kind of a theme for our trip: I learned it on ukulele while we were out there and the 9-year-old even requested it — but it’s a song that works better for me towards the end of a side.)

Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” wasn’t on my original playlist, but I heard it by the side of the pool and I got excited because I love that song and started singing along and realized I haven’t put that one on a mix yet. (They were playing a lot of great Jamaican tracks at the resort we stayed at.) 

Everything on this mix is streaming for now, so you can listen on Spotify: 

This is the 9th mix I’ve made this year — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 6+ hour playlist out of them.

Today’s newsletter was really an excuse to tell you about my vacation (and mess around with recall):

I’m adding the Windward Coast and North Shore of Oahu to my list of magical happy-making drives along the Pacific Ocean. Green mountains, palm trees, sunny beaches, swimming with sea turtles and dolphins, poke bowls, plate lunches, cold coconuts, shaved ice, McDonald’s drive-thrus that still do fried pies, lizards, mongooses, peacocks, horses, feral chickens, Banyan trees, ukulele shops, and watching every sunrise and every sunset. It was the best vacation we’ve ever been on.

I feel about Hawaii the way Mark Twain did:

No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloudrack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes; I can hear the plash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

Read all about “The North Shore.”