Damn rotten op

Gotta love the anargram server...

Today's random top ten from the school iTunes:

• "Traffic Jam" by Yonder Mountain String Band - seven minutes of live Yonder Mountain, my favorite kind of Yonder Mountain...this one isn't the one to bring the house down, but it's a decent enough framework from some instrumental noodling
• "Factor-Label It, Baby" by Michael Offutt - yup, dorky chemistry music...I've got three or four cds of this guy's work on my school computer
• "Human Touch" by Bruce Springsteen -
  Bruce put out a pair of discs at the same time when I was in high school: Human Touch and Lucky Town...they weren't too well received at the time, but they've aged surprisingly well...this one's nice, as are most of the songs on the album - not great stuff, but nice
• "A Taste of Honey" by Jackie Gleason - instrumental bee-bop that everybody knows the tune to...no words from Jackie here, but his swing band was surprisingly popular...this is a classic...
• "Your Love is My Rest" by Jimme Dale Gilmore - most people know this Texas twanger as Smoky from The Big Lebowski, but I know him as a hell of a singer of old standards and country swing music...this track's from One Endless Night, a more traditional disc that followed up his classic Braver Newer World...he's a hell of a singer with a unique voice...worth hunting down
• "Help Me Mary" by Liz Phair - it's hard to find enough clean Liz to take into school, but I've managed it...this is from her brilliant Exile in Guyville album and launched her into a career that she would later pull back from for a bit before throwing herself into full pop-rock genre these past couple of albums...gimme early, vulgar, foul Liz over any of the later stuff...
• "Mingus Eyes" by Richard Thompson - dark, dark stuff from Thompson here...excellent guitar workout, though...from possibly his best album as a solo artist - Mirror Blue...a little overproduced at times but still a great disc...and this one's held up well in concert the times I've seen him play it
• "Bleed" by Collective Soul - the intro is a rip from The Who and the rest of the song's nothing but typical early 90's rock, but it works pretty well...very much of a period - the end of high school and start of college for me...it's a time I remember fondly, and this always makes me think of Tom Boofter's apartment...
• "Knee 5" by Phillip Glass - now here we go with the freaky, freaky...atmospheric music from an opera called Einstein on the Beach in typical Glass style with droning, hypnotic tones rising and falling behind spoken words that are so fast and low in the mix that they're unintelligible...both of which are under a chorus of voices counting from one to four, one to six, one to eight, and repeating...halfway through, the track switches to what sounds like an old black man with forced upper-crust intonation telling a "story of love..."the oldest story in the book"...I love the entirety of the opera but know that for many people it would be torture...
• "Sleepy Maggie" by Ashley MacIsaac - before he went crackers, headed into the ditch of celtic techno, and suffered some rather unfortunate rumors (none of which I've heard reported reliably, so I'm skipping the substance of the rumor), MacIsaac was a grunge fiddler from Cape Breton in Canada...this, his debut album as an adult rocked the celtic world hard and fast and with no relent...he was as electric in concert as on cd, but then he pulled back into Canada...