Steel Wagstaff

Trying to do good things for good reasons

  • 75 Tracks [Best of July 2013]

    75 Tracks [Best of July 2013]

    75 songs I listened to and liked in July 2013. It was the middle of the summer, and this list now sounds surprisingly heavy with a few artists I was very, very into that month: Johnny Flynn, DM Stith, Patrick Watson, Typhoon, and Simone White, among others. Hope you enjoy these summerish sounds.

  • 150 Tracks [Best of June 2013]

    150 Tracks [Best of June 2013]

    This is a bigger mix: 150 songs I listened to and liked in June 2013. Heavy on female singer-songwriters, I notice in hindsight. Tried not to put more than 3-4 songs from the same album in here, or half a dozen by the same artist. I remember being really into Blue Sky Black Death, Angel…

  • 50 Tracks [Best of May 2013]

    50 Tracks [Best of May 2013]

    April had 100 tracks, and May had but 50. More time out of doors, perhaps? All the same, there are some lovelies in here. Fair amount of Bob Dylan, Sharon Van Etten, and Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Enjoy.

  • 100 Tracks [Best of April 2013]

    100 Tracks [Best of April 2013]

    Here are the 100 songs that I listened to and liked in April 2013. Pretty gentle, slightly sad music for the most part, I’d say. It was a good month. A lot of Clem Snide, Low, Keaton Henson, Mountain Man, and Emily Wells, with a fair amount of Sharon Van Etten and Ólöf Arnalds thrown…

  • 24-Hour MEGA MIX [Best of March 2013]

    24-Hour MEGA MIX [Best of March 2013]

    I listened to (and liked) a ton of music in March 2013, apparently. Turns out I’ve got a playlist of almost 24 hours of starred songs from that month, which makes it a perfect end of year-New Year’s mix. Going back through this playlist was an absolute (and often surprising) joy. It’s a pretty eclectic…

  • Best of 2013 & 2012 [TUMBLR]

    Best of 2013 & 2012 [TUMBLR]

    As the year ends, it offers all kinds of opportunities for reflection. For me, the year generally feels like a ceaseless whirlwind, mostly enjoyable, but very fast-paced, and without natural break points or times built-in reflection and gathering. Because these times aren’t built in to my life, and I haven’t been very good about establishing…

  • Spotify Series: Starred Songs, January-February 2013

    Spotify Series: Starred Songs, January-February 2013

    This is the second of the starred song Spotify playlists that I’m sharing each week. These are all the songs that I starred in January and February of 2013 (the first two months of my current job!). 74 playable tracks (lasting about 4 and a half hours). Listening back through it, I’m feeling pretty happy…

  • Spotify Series: Starred Songs, Year 1

    Spotify Series: Starred Songs, Year 1

    It’s been almost a year since I stopped doing the radio show (how time flies!). I miss it–the weekly scramble to develop a compelling theme, pull together a play list, get my songs and files in order, set up the segways and get on the air. Being on the radio was a blast, and Pete…

  • Expressing Gratitude

    Expressing Gratitude

    In 1934, when George Oppen was 26 years old, he published Discrete Series, a volume of his poetry. It included a preface from Ezra Pound, then living in Rapallo, Italy, which ended with these lines: “I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man’s sensibility and which has not been got out of any…

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  • In Search of Lost Whittenbergers

    In Search of Lost Whittenbergers

    It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind ever since I dug out the old issue of the Whittenberger Summer Writing Project and decided that I wanted to try to find and contact everyone who had attended. I can only imagine what organizers of high school reunions have to deal with, but this has been…

  • Whittenberger Summer Writing Project: 1998

    Whittenberger Summer Writing Project: 1998

    One of the other things that I’ve recently decided to do (apart from weeding my library and pruning my record collection) is to finally dig into the huge pile of papers, photos, notes, letters, and memories I’ve stored in boxes and carried from apartment to apartment over the past decade or so. It’s just been…

  • The Memory Collector Project: Post 1

    The Memory Collector Project: Post 1

    A few weeks ago I decided it was time to tame the archive of my life. I’ve been something of a collector over the years, accumulating all kinds of things (papers, notes, writing, letters, books, music (especially records), baseball cards, coins, etc.). Most of them I never use, but keep in closets, only pulling out…

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  • A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

    A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been attracted to wisdom literature. In my early teens, that attraction was felt most strongly toward Thoreau, Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and the other Stoics, Joseph Smith’s King Benjamin (from the book of Mosiah in the Book of Mormon) & Enoch (from the Book of Moses in…

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  • Show On Hold

    Show On Hold

    I’m sad to report that Steel’s Magnolias is finished–or at the very least on hiatus. I’ve accepted a full time job, and don’t have the time to put together and host a radio show each week while holding down work, life, and dissertation duties. I hope to come back from time to time with special…

  • Show 21: Holiday Music

    Show 21: Holiday Music

    This was the last show of 2012, so I focused the two hours on Holiday music–mostly a collection of Christmas themed songs. Lots of magnolias in this show Spotify didn’t offer access to, so check out the full show if you don’t want to miss anything.

  • Show 20: Thanksgiving!

    Show 20: Thanksgiving!

    We came back on the week after Thanksgiving with a sweet little show on Thanksgiving, gratitude, and expressing feelings of appreciation. Part 1: Part 2:

  • Show 19: Tumblrweeds at Year’s End

    Show 19: Tumblrweeds at Year’s End

    This week we finished up recapping the year in my Tumblr’d music with a fun, eclectic show. http://open.spotify.com/user/steelwagstaff/playlist/6AAzVsJUwKvPymygw1AX88

  • Show 18: Still Tumbrling After All These Years

    Show 18: Still Tumbrling After All These Years

    Continued the theme from the week previous, playing songs I’d posted to my Tumblr blog over the previous year. One of my favorite shows so far.

  • Show 17: Tumblring Through the Year

    Show 17: Tumblring Through the Year

    In honor of the 1st anniversary of my tumblr blog, I dedicated the show to digging back through the archive of all the music I posted to that blog over the past year musical posts. More to come next week. Enjoy!

  • Grimethorpe

    Grimethorpe

    When I was 19 years old, just after completing my first year at a large university in the American West, I left school to spend two years as a Mormon missionary in the Northeast of England. When I arrived in Britain, I knew little to nothing about the present social or economic conditions of the…

About the Author

Hi, I’m Steel Wagstaff. I’m the product manager for Pressbooks, a Canadian company making open source book publishing software.

I live in Eugene, Oregon with my wife, Laurel Bastian, and our elementary-school aged son.

I love poetry, music, libraries, reading, playing pickup soccer, & eating vegetarian food.

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