Artist	Song
Petra Haden	I Can See for Miles
Stone Temple Pilots	Dancin' Days
The Walkmen	We've Been Had
Ben Flods	Bastard (Live @ Tower Records)
Stereolab	Vodiak
Funki Porcini	Theme Music For Nothing
Jens Lenkman	Pocketful of Money
The Raincoats	And Then It's OK
Beck	Black Tambourine
Mosquitos	Vagalume
Lush	Lit Up
Pete Townshend	Never Ask Me
Four Tet	Hands
True Love Always	Party Time
Velvet Underground	I'm Sticking With You
Pipas	Riff Raff
Paul McCartney	Maybe I'm Amazed
Donald Fagen	Walk Between the Raindrops
Rush	Making Memories
Talking Heads	Cities
Mark Eitzel	Sacred Heart
Led Zeppelin	Fool In the Rain
Ratt	You're In Love
Shudder to Think	Saddest Day of My Life
They Might Be Giants	Pet Name
Belle and Sebastian	Wrapped Up In Books
R.E.M.	Driver 8
Hugo Largo	Jungle Jim
Peter Murphy	Cuts You Up
Sugar	If I Can't Change Your Mind

Comment:

A high-capacity iPod is a nostalgic music geek's best friend. The 'Shuffle Songs' function doesn't usually produce coherent playlists, except once in a while. Like this time. Well, to me it coheres...

Let's face it, no one hears pieces of music the same way because individual songs are tied to each person's individual experiences (associations with particular corresponding places, times and friends, etc..,), so I can push this list as a collection of good songs, but to me, many of them are snapshots from, variously: college study sessions, coffeehouse singer/songwriter open-mic's, late night roadtrips with a now-deceased childhood friend, lounging poolside on a Medditerranean honeymoon cruise, high school rock band rehearsals, handling bongos on a barely-rehearsed version of Zeppelin's "Dancin' Days" with some musician friends onstage at a bar in Tucson, relaxing in a former lover's East Village apartment, parousing the CD racks at various used music stores, playing a slasher victim in a teenage brother's D.I.Y. camcorder horror movie, acoustic guitar mimi-jam sessions in a friend's living room, spontaneously dancing with a friend in the aisle of a supermarket at midnight, dancing with my wife on our wedding night, bouts of insomnia watching alternative rock music videos into the wee hours, nights out with friends at cheesy hair-matal clubs, nights out with friends a decade later at hipster downtown bars, etc, etc, etc... I enjoy these songs as much for the memories the evoke as for the quality of the songs themselves.

So yeah, no one else would hear this mix the same way I do, but for me, hearing these songs all in a row was like flipping back and forth to random pages in a giant photo album...

Okay... after all that blathering about subjectivity and context, I'll allow myself this one declaration: If the alt-rock revolution produced a more perfect pop song than Sugar's "If I Can't Change your Mind", then I haven't heard it.

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