Spring Mix Meme

Another one of those music memes making the rounds on LiveJournal and the rest of the blogosphere.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your Spring. Post these instructions in along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

Only seven songs? Over the last few weeks, I've migrated my Friday music posts from posting songs to sharing sites to posting songs to muxtape, where you're allowed up to 12 tracks, but I've settled on ten tracks as the ideal length. So I'm listing ten songs. Ten songs at three minutes each is about a half hour or one side of a Certron C60.

So here are ten songs chosen from the M section of my library. Some of them are old songs from the 60s, some are new songs from this year, and some are newer versions of older songs, but they're all very good. I don't like songs that aren't very good.

1. The Magnetic Fields - California Girls (from Distortion) The new MFs album is kind of a mixed bag for me (I concur with the assessment that "a little distortion goes a long way"), but this song shines through the mush.

2. Manfred Mann - My Little Red Book(from The Best of Manfred Mann)
Just the next song that grabbed my fancy in alphabetical order.

3. Marillion - Lavender (from Misplaced Childhood) Today is Fish's 50th birthday. If "Musical Box" by Genesis were condensed down to two minutes and 27 seconds, the results would be "Lavender".

4. Mas Rapido! - Christopher Robin's Dead (from Parasol sampler) Some of us may remember Mas Rapido! by their earlier names Toothpaste 2000 or Cowboy & Spin Girl. If they keep changing the band name every few albums they might come up with a good one.

5. The Meadows - Forever California (from First Nervous Breakdown) Something I downloaded on a whim from emusic that I really like. Very laid back and folky pop, not exactly earth shattering, but perfect for sunny Spring days.

6. Mr. D - New Day (from Wings & Wheels) I checked this out a while ago on a recommendation from the fine folks at 125 records. Sue and Joe have their own muxtapes. Joe's tape has another Mr. D tune from the same album.

7. The Monkees - Mary, Mary (from More Of The Monkees) Mike Nesmith wrote this song before he joined the Monkees and it was released by Paul Butterfield before they recorded it. Apparently covering a song written by a Monkee hurt Butterfield's blues cred. People were a lot stupider back in the 60s.

8. The Mood Six - I Wanna Destroy You
(from Songs From The Lost Boutique)
I don't know a whole lot about the Mood Six. According to their bio, they were part of the short-lived UK psychedelic revival that swept London's West End in the early 80's, were often compared to Squeeze, R.E.M. and The dB's. That was pretty much all it took for me to download this whole album from emusic. This is a cover of a Soft Boys song, and they also covered Todd Rundgren's "I Saw The Light" and the Groovies' "Shake Some Action". My new favorite obscure band.

9. The Moody Blues - The Story In Your Eyes
(from Every Good Boy Deserves Favour)
One of the Moody Blues six good songs? The Loud Family used to cover this one.

10. The Moore Brothers - Sorting Books
(from Now Is The Time For Love)
Two voices and one guitar. This song slays me every time I hear it.

I don't like to do the "tagging" thing, but any readers are encouraged to share songs that they're currently into, either in the comments or their own blogs. There's no need to mux them up or link to songs or videos, just listing them is fine.