What Happened To The Mixtape Ted Lucas?
Every month we listen to a new (to us) album start to finish while drinking a cup of specialty coffee. This month we explore singer, songwriter, and blues guitarist Ted Lucas by Ted Lucas (1975).
In 2025, I assembled a mixtape playlist for every month of the year. I committed to sticking to the demands of the blank (mostly Memorex) cassette tapes I used to record songs of the radio when I was a kid—45 minutes to a side. You can click through to our Spotify profile below and jam out to those anytime you like.
I mostly work from home, and on the days I don't have a scheduled Coffee People interview, I keep to a fairly consistent (albeit loose) itinerary.
- Wake up.
- Open the door for Quito (the dog).
- Get his breakfast ready.
- Wait patiently for him to return from his first sniffing session of the day.
- Grind coffee. Measure out the water. Brew.
- Assemble breakfast: Yogurt, granola, peanut butter, and some dark chocolate chips for good measure.*
- Join Quito on the oversized chair with the heating pad.
- Pull a blanket over him. He's worn out from the sniffing and breakfast.
- Read a few pages of a book.
- Look outside at the sparrows, finches, and dark-eyed juncos congregating in the tree near the fence.
Through it all, I'm playing music.** Sometimes, it is new music or an old coffee drinking mixtape, but more and more, I'm finding an album to listen through start to finish as it was originally presented.
Click to see our Spotify profile and all of our monthly playlists.
In the current era, music comes out more as singles than complete albums, but there was a time pre-iPod—not so long ago, really—that albums were released as a complete reflection or story of what an artist(s) was trying to convey with their art.
In 2026, I decided to take a different approach to the music I listen to in the morning with my cup of coffee. Find one album. Press play on track one. Let it ride.
Before making such a drastic life change, I had already begun assembling my January Mixtape. One song had become a comforting earworm that came with a timely emotional arc. Baby Where You Are by Ted Lucas was one of the first songs on the list. I found myself listening to it repeatedly, not just with coffee but throughout the day.
So, this month, I chose Ted Lucas by Ted Lucas (1975). Today, I'm listening with a cup of light roast High Desert Sunrise blend from Sisters Coffee Co. just over the hill in Central Oregon. It was brewed at 16:1 on the Simply Good Brewer with the thermal pot and redesigned lid.
It is a song that reminds me of my wife, with whom I spent the first days of January celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary. We were young, and there were plenty of bets made against us at the time. I feel like we're definitely owed a few six-packs. When I say it reminds me of her, it is the emotion of the song—comforting—that I refer to. My wife is home to me.
The song lyrics aren't complex. In fact, there aren't even very many of them, but they are repeated in such a pleasant way with such a poignant message that they encapsulate how I've felt the past two decades.
If I could be, baby where you are
If I could be, baby where you are
If I could see, baby what you see
Then I would know, baby what you know
Just to be, baby where you are
If I could go, baby where you go
If I could know, baby what you know
Then I could see, baby what you see
• Ted Lucas, Baby Where You Are
My repeated listens inspired me to seek out the entire album. I admit a wild ignorance of who Ted Lucas was, and even what era he was singing those words in. I assumed he was a modern singer-songwriter with a bent for the type of lilting guitar playing you might find around a campfire during any decade since the 1950s.
Imagine my surprise to learn that he passed away in 1992, relatively unknown, as a studio musician from the Midwest. Much of his career, he played backup guitar for bands in the Detroit, MI area before eventually heading for Los Angeles as a guitarist under contract with Motown Records.
According to Last.fm, he fronted a series of bands you've never heard of, but also played guitar on albums put out by Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, and The Supremes. He performed with the Eagles, Black Sabbath, Ravi Shankar, and Frank Zappa. He was a classically trained guitarist and became a skilled sitarist under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar.
His self-titled Ted Lucas album was put out in 1975, and yet here it was, popping up in my feed thirty years later. Most references indicate he was unappreciated as a solo artist during his time, but has gained a following among later generations.
The album is split into two distinct styles. The first six songs are singer-songwriter ballads that cover being in love, the connectedness of humans looking for purpose, and the joy of being stoned. His opening track, Plain & Sane & Simple Melody, is a call for us to recognize that, despite our differences, a simple song can bring us together.
He follows it up with a few songs about how life is a challenge, but gets easier in retrospect. The first half of the album closes with his odes to love and getting stoned. It all feels so...effortless.
The songs are short, to the point, and timeless. What I'd refer to as Side 1 thematically clocks in at under 20 minutes. Track seven is a clear change of pace. Robins Ride picks up the pace to let us know we're moving into a jam band-like state.
Sonny Boy Blues is a seven-minute-long crescendo that plays like an instrumental for more than four minutes before tackling the classic blues theme of drinkin' too much wine. You hear the grimy influence of Detroit blues, and it isn't hard to imagine he is directing his raspy overtures to himself in the mirror.
Lucas introduces the sitar over the next few tracks which combine hippie-era themes of love and peace and disjointed power structures. All of Ted Lucas' influences and skills are on full display, but I won't proclaim it goes great with my cup of coffee. It's a different vibe. I bet it would fit a lot better with a sativa-infused gummy, which might blow the mind of one Ted Lucas.
He closes out the album by reverting back to his songwriter with a guitar routine. Head in California begins with a finger-picking intro before relaxing into a swaying on the beach routine, reminding us that wherever our bodies might lie, our minds and thoughts are certainly welcome to go somewhere else.
As a coffee drinkin' album, Ted Lucas by Ted Lucas is timeless. The first half, in particular, puts me in the right mindset to tackle the day—relaxed, uplifted, and with a willingness to take on the world with my lovely partner in life and Quito the dog.
WHERE WE'VE BEEN: STEADY STATE ROASTING, CARLSBAD, CA
Ryan Woldt
