A Springy Musical Meme

Instructions via Keith R.A. DeCandido, and, before him, the great Internet hivemind:

Music meme: List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your LJ along with your 7 songs.

1. The Dollyrots, "Because I'm Awesome" -- A pop-punk gem with great attitude; just the song to sing along to in those first days when you have the windows rolled down.

2. Harley Poe, "Corrupting My Better Half" -- Through some sort of space-time warp, this song fell out of the Violent Femmes's first album and landed in 2006. I haven't heard anything else from Harley Poe yet, but I will.

3. Rachel Smith, "Juanita" -- I have an odd weakness for quiet songs driven by a concertina, and I've heard several of them lately. This is the best of that lot, a lovely song from a woman with an almost-conversational voice.

4. We Are Soldiers We Have Guns, "Songs That No One Will Hear" -- A gem of a song, with a female singer whose voice is almost too sweet and fragile...but never too much so.

5. Blaggards, "Drunken Sailor" -- On the other side, here's an old sea shanty. The Blaggards sound like the Pogues after ten years as the house band for some Austin honkey-tonk.

6. The Shondes, "Let's Go" -- Another tough song with unconventional instrumentation -- fiddles are another sound I love to find in unexpected places -- from a Brooklyn band with attitude and chops to burn.

7. Bodies of Water, "I Guess I'll Forget the Sound, I Guess, I Guess" -- This is what '70s art rock would have sounded like if it had been made by ex-madrigal singers rather than ex-art college kids -- a big song with sharp highs and lows and wonderful harmonies that builds and builds to a magnificent finish.

8. Creature, "Bridgette Bardot" -- A brand-new song that sounds like one of the more bizarre manifestations of '80s Euro-disco; a call-and-response song about Bardot, more or less, that almost manages to make me want to dance.

9. Elis Paprika, "No Me Vas a Callar" -- Well, it's mostly in Spanish, so I have no idea what it's all about. But it fucking rocks, and that's all that matters.

(Sorry, I got carried away. And I also avoided the songs I listed in "Fingertips" back in December, even though I'm still listening to a lot of those a lot of the time. Links on songs are either to legal free download pages or to official YouTube videos. Hope you find something you like, or are inspired to do something similar on your own blog/LJ.)