What I love most about NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts is their ability to delightfully surprise me. If I wish of anything for Manila Folders, it is to do the same.
Please enjoy Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw perform four songs of classic German poetry, and may it move you as it did me.
This past Friday, Childish Gambino put his 2011 EP which is simply titled “EP” on Spotify. To say the least, I was HYPED. Listening over the 5 tracks brought such nostalgia, as it was around this time that I felt like I was finally starting to discover music for myself and not purely piggyback on my brother’s music.
If I can remember correctly, that EP was some of the first music I had heard from Gambino. More specifically, I think it was the music video for “Freaks and Geaks.” Seeing the EP put on Spotify sent me barreling backwards in time. In a similar fashion to what I did after I first heard Gambino’s music, this weekend I went back to the beginning and consumed all of Gambino’s mixtapes.
If you’re a fan of Childish Gambino, but aren’t too familiar with his earlier work, you can find his early mixtapes on DatPiff. Unfortunately, when you search his mixtapes they appear in order of popularity/relevance. So if you want to listen to them in the order they were released, here you go:
Below I’ve included “Do Ya Like” off of Culdesac which uses an awesome Adele sample, “Freaks and Geeks” off of EP, and “Unnecessary” off of Royalty (which I will argue is one of the best mixtapes ever produced, and contains some of the best features of all time).