Made You A Mix
Weekly Virtual Mix Tape: January 31st, 2025
We're celebrating the upcoming 5th anniversary of the Weekly Virtual Mix Tape at Red Chuck Productions!
For nearly half a decade, we've been bringing you collections of great music from near and far, from artists on stages large and small. Now it's time for Justin to step aside and hand over the reins to a few of those artists and friends.
To celebrate, we've invited a series of guests curators to share some favorites tunes of their own. We'll be checking in with past Anywhere The Needle Drops guests and old friends of Red Chuck Productions!
Singer/songwriter Abbie Thomas brings us our next set of tunes!
Abbie is the two-time winner of the Artist of the Year Award at the Josie Music Awards. We chatted with her on Anywhere The Needle Drops in 2023. Abbie spent most of 2024 recording, releasing, and touring her newest album, Not Gonna Lie. Read her thoughts on her playlist, 12 Songs I Listened to When Pitching the Album to my Co-Producers, below:
Rock Steady, Aretha Franklin
Doo Wop, Lauryn Hill
Shine Through, Goldford
How Deep Is Your Love (Live) PJ Morton Featuring Yebba
Tell The Truth, Jon Batiste
Rolling in the Deep, Adele
Georgia, Ray Charles
Dive, Olivia Dean
Cold Cold Heart, Norah Jones
Good Kisser, Lake Street Dive
Can’t Fight, Lianne La Havas
Wonderful World, James Morrison
Give A Man a Fish, Arrested Development
I listen to SO much music, but I try not to listen when I’m writing or producing so that my art isn’t derivative in any way. But, I knew my co-producers like to reference other songs/artists actively when they are recording. Both ways of working are so valuable, and we wouldn’t have ended up with the album we did without both approaches.When I pitched my album to my two co-producers, Nate Butler and Simon Kauffman Hurst, I made sure to have some references ready to make sure they knew who I really was so we could be on the same page. This also helped me make my album budget.
All the references above were selected for random reasons; I liked how the strings were used in some, I loved how the background vocals were pretty much their own instrument in others, and a few had nods to jazz, which was very important to me, etc. Jon Batiste was a big reference for his 2021 Grammy winning album, “We Are”, as all the instruments were so forward in the mix, but not stepping on each other. There were so many other references the session musicians were given in the moment, like “think Queen but don’t go too far”, “Muscle Shoals vibe on guitar”, “channel Ray Charles this time”, etc. It was fascination to watch the other musicians change direction on a dime.
links:
Facebook: @officialabbiethomas
Instagram: @abbiethomasmusic
YouTube: @AbbieThomasMusic
TikTok: @abbiethomasmusic
The Red Chuck Weekly Virtual Mix Tape playlists are a collection of ten songs I've been listening to this week, crossing genre, era, and taste. No themes, just the tunes I've been sticking in my ears lately.
Available on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, & YouTube.
Made You A Mix is a weekly virtual mix tape playlist (available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, & YouTube) of ten songs I've been listening to this week, crossing genre, era, and taste.
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