Artist	Song
Tomoyasu Hotei	Battle Without Honor or Humanity
Vaeda	Nervous
Boys Like Girls	The Great Escape
Stroke 9	The One
Spoon	You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
Bridges and a Bottle	18
Satellite Party	Wish Upon a Dog Star
Gomez	See the World
Matt Wertz	Carolina
The Shins	Know Your Onion!
La Rocca	This Life
Dirty On Purpose	No Radio
My Morning Jacket	Anytime
The Sharp Things	What's the New Girl Wonder
Margot and the Nuclear So and So's	Vampires in Blue Dresses
Mew	Am I Wry? No
O.A.R.	Love and Memories
The Cloud Room	Hey Now Now
The Fratellis	Henrietta
Enter the Haggis	One Last Drink

Comment:

I'm a 40+ father of three which means it's impossible for me to be hip or cool. However, my daughter and I had always bonded over music and shared our favorites and managed to broaden each other's musical horizons. She's off at her first year of college and asked if I'd send her a mix CD every now and then.

The first CD I sent was just a bunch of current Adult Top 40 stuff quickly thrown together and probably doesn't bear mentioning. For this one, however, I wanted a more "college radio" feel but because of the aforementioned lack of cool, I had no idea what that even meant.

I browsed a few college rating sites to get a feel for the artists mentioned and then discovered the Haystack online music community which is now one of my favorite spots on the web. All but two of the songs on the CD are ones that I learned about on that site. Hence the name "Needles in a Haystack." All 18 songs from the site in the listing above have links to the song page on Haystack.

Yes, some of it's all sugary, emo-blasted pop/rock. Yes, some of the bands lacks substance. And yes, much of it was probably all written to appeal teen-aged girls. However, there's also beautifully crafted stuff like Spoon's "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" and Gomez's "See the World" (which I think I've played once every day since I first heard it). If it's not all deep, at least it's all fun.

Plus, my daughter's still technically a teen-aged girl. SO there.

Enjoy!

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