I’ll be the first to admit that this mp3 blog doesn’t serve up nearly enough mp3s.

I have a few theories as to why this is so, but I’d say reason numbero uno is that blog posts spend more time in my head than in my text editor. And by the time I actually make time to sit down and write, my post is old news.

A few times, I’ve even gotten as far as uploading the mp3s I was going to write about. That’s where today’s post comes in - five songs that have been rotting away on a webserver on the intarweb for months or years (in one case almost two years). Until today:

Casey Neill - Moly. This foray into bluegrass had no real blog post behind it. It was just part of an inside joke and a guilty pleasure that I planned to make public to the world. This song (and the collection behind it, 2005’s “Memory Against Forgetting” on Daemon Records) has since been eclipsed by Casey’s amazing “Brooklyn Bridge”, and live shows with his new band The Norway Rats have prompted one local journalist to compare it to “Pete Seeger grabbing a downed power line.”

DJ Shadow - Backstage Girl (featuring Phonte Coleman). From a post about songs you can’t play with your kids in the car, this song (from last year’s “The Outsider”) appeals to me because it straddles the fence between hip-hop and rock. This sort of crossover has been done before, but most of it has been motivated by commercial appeal. Extra points to Phonte C for the myspace reference.

The Minders - Don’t Bring Me Down (ELO cover). From the “Bridging The Distance” compilation that came out earlier this spring, this was going to be part of a review of a Minders / ApeShape show that my buddy Todd and I went to in April at the Langano Lounge. The Minders have been one of my favorite bands for years, but it took this cover to get me out of the house and into the Langano Lounge to see them live for the first time in 2 years or so. It also clears up the mystery lyric….Don’t bring me down / BRUCE!

Ape Shape - The Things That Dreams Are Made Of (live) (Human League cover). From the April 27th show at Langano Lounge, this song was captured by me on my little Sony digital camera. I had no idea who Ape Shape was going into the gig, but in hindsight I’m glad I got there early enough to catch their set and quick enough with my camera to recognize this 23+ year old song and capture it for posterity. Extra points for…..covering Dare-era Human League!! You took me back to my “waver” years. (If I remember correctly, Langano Lounge closed down not too long after this gig.)

Patti Smith - Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect (Decemberists cover). If you’re noticing a covers theme here, it is because the Minders/ApeShape post then morphed into a potential post about covers. Then this particular version (a bonus track from Patti’s cover album “Twelve”) appeared seemingly overnight on about a dozen blogs, and I moved on. It’s still quite a curio though, so have a listen if you haven’t heard it already!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.