Organization, Music

I'm almost done with the soon-to-be-seasonally inappropriate angora sweater. That's all I'm gonna say about knitting for now.

Random act of memory: Susan is owed a 33 1/3 book from the M*****F***ing contest. Susan, which do you want?

Moving on: I have a new computer! I can load music onto my iPod again! I'm in the process of putting my stacks and stacks of CDs onto my iPod, and it's just in time for spring, when a girl's thoughts return to when she used to be a malfeasant pre-teen (if the girl is me). Perhaps it's because I can finally listen to it while walking around, but I'm beginning to suspect that The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America is just as much a spring album as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a winter one.

As for other music I'm listening to: for reasons I won't divulge right now, I have been listening to a lot of music that is (1) 10ish years old and (2) made by women. I'm gonna link these to YSI files tonight, but for right now, descriptions:

Know Your Chicken and Sugar Water by Cibo Matto. I think KYC was more popular, but I like Sugar Water better, and it has a great Michel Gondry video. Everything sounded like Cibo Matto a couple years after this album; possibly because M. Hatori worked on a lot of records, including the first Gorillaz album.

Bright Yellow Gun by Throwing Muses. This was their biggest single when I was listening to college radio in the mid-90s. I had previously been a big fan of a lot of antiseptic, asexual folkie-type lady-music (hello, 10,000 Maniacs); this was all nice and good, but as a teenage girl realizing just how much trouble I could make, it was also quite revelatory to hear K. Hersh's amazing, dangerous-sounding voice. Also, they named an album The Real Ramona. Mad props for that.

(Aside--Tanya Donnelly left/got kicked out of Throwing Muses and Breeders before each of their biggest commercial successes. Poor thing. Belly did fairly well, though, and hers was one of the two Seventeen interviews I remember finding interesting during my grandmotherly-imposed subscription to that magazine. The other was Jon Stewart, back when he had a talk show on MTV.)

PJ Harvey--just in general. I love the production on To Bring You My Love (am I right in believing Down by the Water was her biggest single in the 90s?); I guess the term differentiating it from Rid of Me and Dry would be not-scary. But the two earlier albums are great, too.

So yeah... talk to me about your spring-celebration music, or music made by women ten years ago, or whatever.