On this particular Independence Day, it might feel a bit hard to muster much patriotic spirit when the institutions we’re called on to celebrate seem rotten to the very core. Or well-meaning but ineffectual. The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, indeed. Everyone is in it for the money or something more sinister. “Liberty and justice for all” has always been a troubled concept in this country: promised but tragically, pathetically never delivered upon. And I don’t see it getting less so in the years to come. It’s easy to start down the rabbit hole of skepticism, cynicism, pessimism. It’s never too comfortable to look into the actual scope of the freedom we’re celebrating, either when it was established or where we seem to be headed.

So instead we’ll celebrate a different kind of freedom. A freedom of eccentricity. A freedom to be strange, to express the odd worlds we build inside our heads and hearts, and a freedom to share them with others. This is a freedom that nobody can take away from us as long as we’re alive, because it’s within us. This is a freedom from convention, expectation, or judgment.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again, fundamentally the history of America is created by and told by eccentrics. And sung by them, too. So here’s a mixtape of some songs by or about American eccentrics through the ages. To me, there is a connecting line through all of these that reflects a sort of honesty or sincerity in the oddness. These aren’t people who are trying to create something strange, these are people who are creating the only way they know how, and expressing the truth the only way that they can. Some of these are eccentric in the sense of being outside the mainstream, others not so much. But they’re all artists whose work strikes me as oddly perfect and perfectly odd. I find a poetry of strangeness in all of them. It’s the selection of one particular eccentric, as most good mixtapes are. Who would you add?

How strange it is to be anything at all.