Leftovers

Originally uploaded by packyourlunch.

If you judge the quality of a party based on the amount of trash it generates, then I’d say Saturday night was a total success.

Melancholy and the Infinite XM

One of my forward looking friends turned me onto to listening to XM radio. She found a way to stream it through WinAmp for free. AOL XM offers about a dozen different channels for you to pick from. Under each channel there are another half dozen or so for you to pick from and really specify what you want to listen to. It’s a great set up.

Plus, looking at the WinAmp interface immediately takes me back to my senior year of college when I was playing Hail to the Thief, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Give Up non stop – It might be impossible for mere mortals to resist that kind of nostalgia.

My personal favorite is the channel Spinner.com. It offers a pretty good mix of rock and of the glorious sub genres that come along with it – not to mention a few stations devoted entirely to indie rock. There’s even a channel called “Melancholia,” which might be my favorite. I don’t tune into it too often, but can how can you pass on a station that’s description is: “The sounds of indie sadness.”

I can’t help but picture people sitting in front of their computers in office across the country with eyeliner streaming down their face thinking “Morrissey has such amazing insight; the guy really does know what it means to be depressed. God… why is Tom wearing that stupid looking tie again?”

For serious, man.

Spinner.com redeems itself by offering the best of what’s being played on college radio, a straight rock mix channel and a punk channel. There’s even an alt country channel, if that’s your thing.

Apparently, alt country is my thing. I was on my way to the Ween show in Boston last week with my friend Matt and was trying to convince him to make the switch over to XM. We were on 28 heading into the city and I mentioned the alt country channel in front of the Museum of Science.

“There’s an alt country channel?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Actually now that you mention it, I think I’ve been listening to it a little too much.”

He laughed at me for the rest of the night about that. We’ve all got our vices and guilty pleasures. I just never expected one of mine to involve a steel guitar, a twang, a big pair of boots and a hat.

Well, not when it came to music anyway.