After tragedy hits so close to home, people want to be able to help in any way possible–to do something, anything, to relieve those struck the hardest. Just hours after Monday’s bombings, Red Cross reached its demand for blood supply. Thousands of people in the Boston area offered up their homes, transportation, and even their furry pets to anyone left without shelter and in need of a smile following the attacks. And in the days since, bouquets of flowers and signs of support piled up along the barriers marking the Boylston area crime scene, relaying warm messages of love in honor of our mending city.
Mending, of course, is not a quick or easy process, and there are still more ways to contribute to the relief efforts; this is something that local music blog Allston Pudding recognized in the grief-stricken aftermath of the attack. So, they decided to do something for the community that has embraced them since they launched their blog in 2010: compile a mixtape in honor of the marathon relief efforts.
“We wanted to do something that the community could rally behind, and hopefully raise some money to aid the victims,” said Allston Pudding co-founder Daniel Schiffer. “We’re used to putting together monthly mixtapes, so it seemed both relevant to our mission and appropriate as a way to bring people together.”
After posting about the mixtape on Facebook, co-founder Perry Eaton received hundreds of responses from artists across the country who wanted to contribute a track to the tape, which will be available on Bandcamp. With 100 percent of the proceeds going to The One Fund Boston (where Red Cross suggests donations be made), listeners can download the tracks for a minimum donation fee of $1; anything more than that is at the discretion of the users. If someone chooses to donate $10 or more, they’ll be entered in a contest to win an Allston Pudding sweatshirt.
Within several hours, word about the mixtape had spread throughout a web of music connections around the country. After the original status posted on Allston Pudding’s Facebook page was shared more than 80 times, the team had to stop the flood of overwhelming artist support in order to begin working on putting it all together.
“In a matter of minutes after we posted the message on our Facebook, my email inbox was stuffed with messages from bands and musicians looking to help,” said Eaton. “I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I was immediately proud of everybody for being so ready and willing.”
In all, the tape will feature 130 separate tracks for immediate download. While a generous portion of the artists who contributed are concentrated in Massachusetts, bands from North Carolina, Chicago, New York, Rhode Island, Maine and more will be seen on the lengthy lineup. Some, like the Tufts-bred band Krill, handed in a previously unreleased recording to make its debut on the marathon relief mixtape.
The link to the mixtape’s Bandcamp pages is available here on Allston Pudding. Considering the size of the immense support–translated into megabytes–the download may take a few minutes.
