Just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, I’ve made a new mixtape for y’all! It’s been a while, I know. While my last mixtape — The Winter Wonderland Mixtape For Headphones — was all about music that made me think of cold, snowy winters, this new mixtape is all about hot sunny days and cool, breezy summer nights. You can download the new mixtape right here.

Ever since I started this whole business of making mixtapes I’ve kept a special playlist in my iTunes for new songs I’ve downloaded, or just songs that I had come upon randomly in my library that I really liked. Suffice to say that playlist has since grown to over 1,200 songs, so the idea of whittling that down to 30+ songs was a daunting prospect indeed. I scrolled down to the middle of the playlist, started clicking through all of the songs, and threw all the ones I liked into a new playlist. A common theme somehow arose and so I just went with it, giving you what we have here today. I hope you enjoy it.

A few highlights include:

–This mixtape got its name from the first track in the mix, Animal Collective’s “Summertime Clothes”. It just happened to randomly be the first song I selected for this mixtape and by a stroke of luck it set the tone for the whole thing. Making it the inspiration for the title seemed like a no-brainer. What’s the meaning of the album artwork I chose for this mix then? Well, I’ll leave that one to you to figure out. (If you’re also wondering why this is called the Summer Clothes Mixtape and not the Summertime Clothes Mixtape, well, that one I can answer. Embarrassingly, I have to attribute that to copying down the song title incorrectly. It wasn’t until the whole package was put together and uploaded to Mediafire that I realized my mistake. Oops.)

–A lot of this mixtape brings up old summer memories for me. During the summer of 2000 I got my first summer job, suddenly came into quite a bit of disposable income, and discovered European electronic dance music thanks to Amazon.com’s (and then Amazon.uk’s) ‘We Recommend’ feature. Obviously this had a huge impact on me, and for the next few years all I listened to was DJ mixes, specifically of trance and — a little later on — house music. After about 2003 new music those genres started to become cliché-filled and derivative so my tastes moved on, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for those genres and they always make me think of summer. In honor of that I’ve included some current trance songs that don’t suck, like Dash Berlin’s “Till The Sky Falls Down” and the Wolfgang Gartner remix of Tiësto’s “I Will Be Here” featuring Sneaky Sound System and some current house tracks like the Burns remix of The Buckethead’s “The Bomb” and Shazam’s remix of Mobroder’s “Love Duet” featuring Amanda Blank.

–If you haven’t yet seen Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, you really should, because it is awesome. And if you have seen it, then you’re probably already familiar with the amazing Metric song “Black Sheep” that they used for the Clash At Demonhead number in the movie.

–Nothing really seems to make you think of summer more than AM radio from the 60’s and 70’s, and in honor of that I’ve included TV Girl’s “If You Want It”, which samples Todd Rundgren’s 1968 classic “Hello It’s Me” and Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros’ new retro-classic, “Home”.

–See if you can figure out which track includes audio from a famous YouTube video. It’s cheesy, I know, but oh so addictive.

Well, it feels like I’ve already spent entirely too much time writing this up, so all I have left to say is: Enjoy!