Songerize will search the web for any song and play it. Not 100% perfect (for example, it often plucks bootlegged live versions of poor quality, and a misspelling will often prevent the song from being found), but interesting.

I thought they stopped making videos this elaborate back when MTV stopped showing music videos, but who am I to complain?

If you bought your iPhone less than fourteen days ago, you can get your $200 back from Apple. If you bought your iPhone fifteen days ago or more, well, that's the cost of being the cool kid on your block. Me, I'm still not buying an iPhone.

Update: Hee!

What happens when the best classical musician in America plays the violin at rush hour at a Metro station? The best features writer in America, Gene Weingarten, has the story.

I'm sentimental about October 29, and Slim and I went to a fun Decemberists concert: 110-minute set, lots of audience participation and chatter from the band, more instruments than you could shake a stick at, plus they played "Losing My Religion""We Go Down Together." We showed up 90 minutes after the doors opened, gravitated to a surprisingly good untaken vantage point at the 9:30 so the short Slim would have a chance to see the stage, and happily ran into our friend Rebekah, who had long ago discovered the spot for her concert-going. The band was on KCRW a few months ago.

I strongly suspect that I was the only American Enterprise Institute resident fellow at the Sleater-Kinney show at the 9:30 tonight, though I did run into an attorney from my old firm. (But not Matthew Yglesias.) The real show didn't start until the encores, when they performed "Ironclad," "Little Babies," "Dig Me Out," "Words and Guitar," and "Turn It On," inter alia. NPR webcast the show and has the full set-list.

Via Radosh, the Music Genome Project does a fascinating job of finding obscure music one might like. Enter a song title into Pandora, and the database dissects the song's elements and finds songs with similar elements. I entered "The Laws Have Changed" by The New Pornographers, and got Weird War's "See About Me," a great song by an obscure band I never would've found, and Mates of State's "Ha Ha." The programming did a poorer job of identifying why I like Sleater-Kinney; in response to "Ironclad" it gave me three other Sleater-Kinney songs, a hard-rock mistake, and an obvious Bikini Kill single. But plugging in "Heaven or Las Vegas" gave me the Stars' "Elevator Love Letter"—as well as the poorer choice of Cyndi Lauper. Interesting stuff.

Unrelatedly: Richard Cheese (Mark Davis) lounge version of Nirvana's "Rape Me" and "You Oughta Know." Davis himself seems frustrated by the inherent limitations of his one-joke gig, but the article is worth it for the mortifying interview with his Costanzan parents.

This, incidentally, is a definitive list that saves you the trouble of looking at any other list. Assuming you share my idiosyncratic tastes.

1. Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree
2. Kaiser Chiefs, Employment
3. Hard-Fi, Stars of CCTV
4. Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
5. The National, Alligator
6. Death Cab for Cutie, Plans
7. The Decemberists, Picaresque
8. The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema

Honorable mentions for singles not on above albums:
1. Kanye West, "Gold Digger"
2. LCD Soundsystem, "Tribulations"
3. Franz Ferdinand, "Do You Want To"
4. Sufjan Stevens, "Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals As I Run"
5. Madonna, "Hung Up"
6. Rihanna, "Pon de Replay"
7. Danny Elfman, "Augustus Gloop"
8. Mike Doughty, "The Gambler"

Bonus 2005 I've Got A Fever And The Only Cure Is More Cowbell Award: Kaiser Chiefs, "Modern Way"

The WaPo covered the story of an 18-year-old arrested for robbing a Metro denizen of an iPod; in a stunning self-parody, the paper felt it needed to include a 77-word description of what an iPod is. This is why the Onion is still occasionally funny.

The Information Leafblower poll is fairly America-centric, which is perhaps why the British band Hard-Fi didn't get a single vote; their energetic Clash-esque/Britpop "Stars of CCTV" (famously made for £300) is one of my favorite albums of the year (for the music if not the dull lyrics), but they're sufficiently obscure that iTunes doesn't even have a legitimate review of the album posted. Not available in stores, available on Amazon as a $23 import, but on iTunes for $9.99.

Their website allows you to play (but not download) songs from the album (click "audio").

I got "Illinois" on Information Leafblower's recommendation (via Karl via a comment thread that started out about a cat). With Sleater-Kinney at #5, the Decemberists at #9, and Mountain Goats at #11, the list had credibility with me, so I decided to try and buy #1 (Stevens), #2 (The National), and #12 (My Morning Jacket).

"Illinois" is the second of a purported fifty-CD cycle on each of the states; it'll be interesting to see what Stevens comes up with when he hits the states that don't even merit their own guidebooks. Question: is it me, or is track 22 of "Illinois", titled "Out of Egypt..." a direct crib from Steve Reich's 1976 "Music for 18 Musicians"? The problem with buying on iTunes is that one doesn't get the liner notes; google only gives me random blog comments with even less knowledge than I have referring to "Reich influence" and arguments whether it's really Philip Glass-influence. The ex-wife got the complete box set of Reich, but I was able to find my earlier purchase of Mf18M, and, other than a slowly plinking piano in the first minute of the Stevens track (which, unfortunately, is what the iTunes 30-second sample comes from), I'm having trouble placing a difference. (Update: a more precise use of my google-fu finds Rolling Stone identifying it as an "echo", as well as someone else who finds the juxtaposition interesting. Also this interview acknowledging the admiration for the piece—and why am I not surprised that Kieslowski's ten-film "Decalogue" is Stevens's favorite movie?)

I like a couple of tracks quite a bit (especially "Chicago" and "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!", the best tracks on the CD not stolen from Steve Reich). But for me, the best aspect of "Illinois" is that it provoked me to get around to ripping my Reich to my iPod; I hadn't listened to it for far too long. I don't mean to be completely down on the Stevens; it is growing on me as I listen through a second time. But my idiosyncratic tastes tend to deduct points from concept albums; I'm just not going to listen to an "Illinois" or "Solex vs. the Hitmeister" that demands more attention without doing enough to merit the extra work through its lyrics or music, and has too many tracks that will need to be skipped in Shuffle mode. This is an entirely unfair way to judge an album, I admit, but I rarely seek out music for music's sake: music is what I listen to when I'm reading or exercising or commuting or sometimes when I'm writing.

Side note: it's now so easy to duplicate with electronics what Reich did with musicians acting with utter precision thirty years ago that the jaw-dropping majesty of it probably doesn't register completely today (imagine keeping perfect time with a marimba for an hour, with one slip completely destroying an entire piece, since the phasing is the essence of it). But I have to wonder if the Reich "cover" helped to push "Illinois" to the top spot in the straw poll among bloggers unfamiliar with the earlier work and whose jaws dropped when they heard it for the first time.

This site has Windows Media Player 30-second samples from a 1999 recording of "Music for 18 Musicians." Thirty seconds doesn't do it justice, of course.