Before the main portion of his Re: Disc COVER lecture, Chris Sutton struck a Sarah Palin-like tone, letting it be known that when he writes about music on his blog Record Lections, he's not concerned about facts, but rather how the songs and albums make him feel.

The idea, I'm guessing, was to let him off the hook for when he screwed up a detail about one of the 15 songs he was about to talk about, but it also added to a rather oppositional stance that the musician/DJ was taking for this evening. Sutton was quick to point out in his opening remarks how frustrating it was for him to find people his age (39) listening to only one kind of music. He was different, you see. He listens to everything. Except the obnoxious subset of '90s hardcore techno known as gabba.

For the next hour, Sutton did his best to prove this point, playing segments of 15 tracks by the likes of DJ Shadow, Augustus Pablo, The Kinks, Growing, and The Shocking Blue and reading his blog entries about the songs or the albums they came from over the top. Some of it was insightful and powerful, like his closing assertion about jazz pianist Thelonious Monk ("Time, by definition is a law. Monk has broken it and showed you how to burn down the jail."); most were as hyperbolic and breathless as you would expect someone's casual music Tumblr to be.

It was never made clear, though, why we should care about his opinions about Hound Dog Taylor or Flipper. Sutton only occasionally connected the songs to his own experiences and only once talked up how a band (ESG) helped inspire the sound of one of his musical projects (C.O.C.O.). And for someone who claims to be a voracious music fan, I found it odd that the most recent track he played was released over a decade ago.

What Re: Disc COVER lacked was, yes, some factual information. And I don't mean just about the artists he was highlighting. I would have loved him to have walked us deeper into his world and show us how these songs affected his life in small or large ways. Or find some dramatic or thematic way to connect all the material that he played outside of the fact that he really likes them. A mixtape without context feels like an odd gift.