Not All Who Wander Are Lost

What do bloggers blog when they have nothing to blog? They hit shuffle on their iPod and apologize for what comes up, a la Random Rules feature over at The AV Club.

Phish -- Round Room. Not the best of Phish, and not the best album; I always thought they went downhill after Rift. But decent radio pablum, noodling from the kings of the noodles.

Patty Griffin -- Every Little Bit. Now that's more like it, though to be fair, it's hard to find a Patty Griffin song off her debut album that isn't both gorgeously raw and pitchperfect. Wistful and anrgy in turns, this one'd make a great introduction to someone who really needed to fall in love with a new musician right now, this minute, today.

Victor Jory -- Tubby The Tuba (side 4). I feel asleep to this LP when I was a wee tot. Went and downloaded off the blogweb over a year ago to play for the kid, but she prefers Guster. Embarassing to have it show up so quick here. Still, useful for those long family drives, I suppose.

Hodges Brothers & the Hi Rhythm Section - Best in Town. Blues of some sort. Oh, right -- this is from the Oxford American Southern Sampler 2000 - my father had a bunch of duplicates of this yearly litmag sampler, and I bumped 'em all in. Not bad. They have good taste.

String Quartet Tribute to the Killers -- Jenny Was a Friend of Mine. Okay, I collect covers. It's like an addiction. And I've just discovered the Killers, and they rock. And this way I can listen to them at supper, and no one knows it's not background music.

Shawn Colvin -- Another Long One. Pre-pop from the award-winning debut of yet another soundtrack goddess. Okay, this got me into a love of produced folk music, and through an entire post-adolescent summer of despair, and I'm eternally grateful for it.

Kathleen Edwards -- Nagasaki. AAA radio darling singer-songwriter goes all ani on this one. It works, kind of, and the strings are nice, but ani does it better, and Kathleen's voice sounds more like she's trying to be suzanne vega, but not as sweetly. I don't know why she bothers -- she does a simply stunning Kathleen on the rest of her catalog.

David Gray -- December. Ah, I love a slow beat and a soaring tenor voice. December is a bit slow, and for Gray, that's saying something. Not as emo as some of his other work, though, so perhaps we'll say this one splits the difference.

R.E.M. -- Can't Get There From Here. A blast from the past. Funny how well the old R.E.M. ages. Like fine cheese. Even if I never did quite take a liking to the Stipe whine.

Alison Krauss -- Looking In To The Eyes Of Love. Oh, that sweet vibrato. I remember seeing Alison Krauss fiddlin' and singin' at a bluegrass festival when we were both seventeen. I'm still in love, still far away.

Jon Brion -- Time Of The Season. California Indie piano darling (a new genre which includes Ben Folds and...um...some other male solo vocalists) covers the Zombies. A lo-fi recording, with an audience sing-along, from his weekly stint at Largo. Fun, but nothing stellar, musically speaking.

More covers, ad infinitum. Acoustic Radiohead mangling the first half of Wonderwall. Peter Mulvey live in the subway, covering For No One. Eric Clapton covering Jimi Hendrix. Keane does Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, also on solo piano, also in live lo-fi. Ah, the wonders of the downloading internet.

Okay, I give up. Granted, some of this stuff might impress the right kind of girl, but this isn't my diverse mp3 collection. What's with all the neo-singer-songwriter stuff tonight? Where's all the rock, the mash-ups, the ska, the punk covers?

Look, I got 6300 songs on the damn thing. They can't all be winners.