One of the things my brother suggested to me when I first mentioned I was going to try to listen to something new musically each week was that I should follow NPR's All Songs Considered on Twitter for some ideas. (Well, that was a long sentence.)

This week, Monday kind of snuck up on me without much new music exposure.

So, remembering his advice, I clicked over to NPR's web site and clicked the 'Music' tab to see if there might be something there to help me out.

There was.

There's an occasional entry there called 'Heavy Rotation', with 5 suggestions from public radio music experts.

This week featured 2 slow-paced songs, 1 rap, a faster-paced pop song, and another song that I think featured a Zimbabwean thumb piano. All from artists I had never heard before.

So instead of just one new music experience this week, I had five. The rap was nothing special, the slow songs were OK (though Miranda Dodson, who sang one of the slower ones, definitely reminded me of someone that I can't immediately place and it was probably my favorite of the five songs), the thumb piano one was unique and it was fine, and I wanted to like the pop-py song but it was just OK.

So none of the songs will stick beyond the couple of listens I gave them over the weekend.

But I gained a new source for some new music.

A couple of things about that: Do you ever get overwhelmed by the internet? I do. It's just so massive, and sometimes I feel like I lose direction and freeze wondering where to go to next, so I just get in the habit of visiting two or three sites and that's it. But now I can maybe mix the NPR Music site into that rotation, so I can look at their Heavy Rotation suggestions.

And then this on NPR - I should probably listen to it more. Sometimes I think I'm the only one who doesn't. I got into a groove for a little while when one of my good friends worked there, and I figured I owed it to him to know what he was doing for a living. And while I did I felt like I belonged to an exclusive little club. But then he left there, and I stopped listening, and my only relationship to NPR is listening to affiliated podcasts. But there's a lot of good listening happening on NPR, isn't there? At least for current events? I guess maybe I should get back into it. Maybe it would make me smarter.

***UPDATE*** - So this is kind of coincidental. Remember back when Music Monday debuted with New Thing #7 - The Modern Lovers? Well, Sunday in the Boston Globe there was an article about how a couple of Massachusetts lawmakers are moving to make 'Roadrunner' an official state song. I told Justin and he suspected they read my post, which spurred the action. Well, obviously.