1. Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, PIECE OF MIND (Windjam) (Boston's best
contribution to jangle-pop return with a new album consisting mostly of
songs they didn't get to record because WB dropped them in the early '80s.)
2. Various Artists, DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERNCE BETWEEN BIG WOOD AND BRUSH
(Bar/None) (My buddy Phil Milstein returns to the history of song-poems
with a fine selection cherry-picked from all six volumes of his MSR Madness
series, including the last two as-yet-unreleased sets.)
3. Baby Grand, SPECTRUM (listened to the full-album stream off their
website last night and had ordered the disc from Parasol by the end of the
third song -- thanks, David!)

That's all I've gotten recently, since I'm saving money for a big record
store crawl later this week.

At 10:06 AM 2/11/2003 -0500, Andrea Kremer wrote:
>PS - I had a felllow power pop fan recently ask me for a "musical
>education" cd based on my own tastes. And you know what I found out?
>Making a mix cd is HARD. If anyone wants to spawn a sub-thread with advice
>about track selection, ordering, etc., GO for it. I need help!

I just made a series of 10 historical (1980-88) CD-rs for one of our
listmates who's considering doing a college-radio tribute gig.  My advice
is to select tracks that you're personally excited about listening to
before you start thinking about stuff like "historical importance" or
whatever, because if it's a CD that you dig listening to, chances are
they'll like it too.  And what I've found works best for ordering is to get
into the burning software (I use Cakewalk Pyro, myself) with all of the
songs in a playlist, pick the song that I think should start the CD and
then go song-by-song from there.  Listen to the end of the first song, then
decide what would sound best starting after that and so on.  After a while,
it all sort of falls into place.

S