Music, sweet music! Oh, how I love it. I wish I could caress and kiss, kiss. (Name that tune!)

Maybe I've got things moving on my musical front again. Rather than waiting for someone to respond to my singer ads, I decided to be proactive and searched on singers around the Atlanta area. You can search by "Influences" and "Sounds Like" on MySpace. I found that if you put in names like Led Zeppelin or ZZ Top you're going to get 22 pages of people who sound very little like Led Zeppelin or ZZ Top. So I tried searching on a more obscure name, Red House Painters, and found a couple of pages of people who sounded like they might genuinely own a Red House Painters CD.

One guy I happened across sounded like Eddie Vedder mixed with the guy from Wilco and a more low-key Bruce Springsteen. I sent this guy a invitation to contribute vocals to my crap tracks, and he agreed. When I sent the MP3's he also responded within 24 hours with comments, whereas the other guy I was excited about...well, he's in the rearview mirror. So we'll see how that goes.

It interested me that he said one of my songs "sounds like early R.E.M. with `70's rock about halfway through." Others have said the same thing, except they usually cite Traffic specifically. This is encouraging. Would you have imagined R.E.M. and Traffic could coexist in the same song? What a groundbreaker I am.

To hedge my bet I also wrote to this other guy who was more `80's metal-oriented, but his voice also sounds more versatile. He does ballads and rock 'n' roll songs and makes both sound smooth as silk. He also agreed to contribute, so I'll pick the best of these two guys.

In other music news, I have to work yet another Saturday, but when I get home I'll have the pleasure of seeing an encore of Explosions in the Sky on Austin City Limits. That 30 minute spot was one of the more impressive things I've seen in the past couple of years, so I look forward to seeing it again, this time with my old-timey VCR set to record. I'll even use the SP mode! You should tune in, too. Midnight on WPBA Channel 30 in Atlanta. Check the listings of your local PBS station elsewhere.

Off you go to enjoy pennywhistles and moonpies and anything else your young heart desires.