We All Go Twang: A When You Awake Collaborative Mixtape

The We All Go Twang mixtape is an annual exercise in shared taste. Every year around the holidays, this site gathers track suggestions from readers, contributors, and the musicians we've spoken with throughout the year, and assembles them into a single sequence.

The criteria are simple: the tracks have to be songs that matter to you personally, not songs that matter because you think they should. The distinction produces a different kind of list than the critical consensus best-of. It produces something more intimate and, often, more useful.

What 2011 sounded like from inside it

2011 was a year with several notable records in the Americana and roots space. The Mountain Goats released All Eternals Deck. Gillian Welch released The Harrow & The Harvest, her first record in eight years, to near-universal recognition as one of the finest records she'd made. Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell released Old Yellow Moon (announced in late 2011, released in early 2012).

The collaborative mixtape doesn't try to represent the year's releases. It tries to represent the songs that the people who care about this music were playing, which often means older material that the year's events had made newly resonant.

The selections

The 2011 collaborative sequence:

• Gillian Welch — "The Way It Goes" (from The Harrow & The Harvest, the recording of the year)
• Hank Williams — "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (returned to by multiple contributors)
• Emmylou Harris — "Pancho and Lefty" (the Townes Van Zandt song in her hands)
• Richard Thompson — "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" (one reader's annual holiday contribution)
• Townes Van Zandt — "Waiting Around to Die" (the song that keeps being rediscovered)
• John Prine — "Angel from Montgomery" (the song that the year seemed to require)
• Iris DeMent — "Our Town" (contributed by two different readers independently)
• Bill Monroe — "Blue Moon of Kentucky" (the foundation, always)
• Patsy Cline — "Walkin' After Midnight" (the other foundation)
• Carter Family — "Wildwood Flower" (where it all comes from)
• Lucinda Williams — "Sweet Old World" (the 1992 recording, the one that matters most)
• Guy Clark — "Old Friends" (the closing track)

On the title

The "We All Go Twang" title refers to the idea that the country and folk and Americana sounds are not genre preferences so much as emotional vocabularies. The people who end up loving this music arrive from very different starting points. Something in the music — the directness, the willingness to address loss and time and love without protective irony — reaches them.

We all go twang eventually. This is a celebration of that.

See all the Mixtapes.