I’m listening to “Visitor” by Onelinedrawing, and I’m proud to say it’s a modern rock/folk/indie/emo album I can highly recommend that has not been played on “The OC” (well… not that I know of). Onelinedrawing is the solo project of Jonah from the now-broken-up Far. It’s a little like Death Cab for Cutie or Iron & Wine, but not completely. It’s definitely worth a listen.

If you’re interested, you should harken to some samples at iTunes or Amazon. Yeah, I said harken. You got a problem? Huh? Huh? That’s what I thought.

Ahem.

For you neo-retro-electronica-lovers, track four (“Smile”) has classic Casio-inspired beats. And for you late-seventies-sci-fi-fans, it has guest “vocals” from R2-D2.

If I ever get an iPod, these are the albums from my collection that definitely need to be on it. They’re not necessarily my favorites, but they’re the ones that say “iPod” loud and clear.

Granted, I could also fit the rest of the albums I own on the 40GB iPod, but that’s irrelevant.

I don’t normally like rap very much, but I recently downloaded and very much enjoy The Grey Album. It’s a remix of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, created by someone named DJ Danger Mouse, using samples from The Beatles’ eponymous-but-aptly-nicknamed The White Album. It’s under fire from EMI, but you can still find it on file-sharing networks.

Jay-Z’s lyrics are rather good, and I find that when rap is combined with familiar samples (and mixed well), it makes the music more exciting. Also, instead of the pounding bass beats found in most hip-hop music, the mixed version generally relies on treble beats, which I prefer.

With the slogan “Hell froze over” emblazoned on their home page, Apple finally released iTunes for Windows. Now I can organize my music collection (close to five thousand songs or fifteen gigabytes or eight days) like all the other cool people in the world (who use actual Macs), and now I can download songs legally from the iTunes Music Store if I want to.

Tuesday night Heather went to her musical theatre workshop class in Torrance. Apparently some girl sang a song called “Old Friend” from the 1978 off-Broadway musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, and Heather called me after class to tell me that the song reminded her of “our relationship.”

Here are the lyrics, and here is a live recording from KUOW Public Radio in Seattle.

Incidentally, I found out that the main character’s name is Heather, which Heather didn’t even know until I told her. I thought that was kind of cool. And the song kind of reminds me of Joni Mitchell or something. It’s very 1978.

As for its relation to our relationship, I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I took the toll road to Amanda’s house last night. The toll road is nicer because it goes through the hills and contains few cars. The sky was starting to get really dark, but you could still tell that it was overcast, and the air was very still. It was Enya weather. So I decided to listen to Watermark for the whole trip.

The song “Exile” (which is track five on the album) was used in L.A. Story to signify rain. Sure enough, when I reached track five, it started to rain. It was very beautiful.