1. **Trout Fishing in America, “I Get Ideas”**. Trout is a great band; they do both children’s
music and adult music. This is one of their children’s songs, but I love it anyway. What’s
not to like about a song that features shampooing with peanut butter?
2. **Gordian Knot, “The Brook The Ocean”**. Gordian Knot is an instrumental progressive rock band consisting of bassist Sean Malone, and whoever else he feels like playing with. GK has included Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn, Steve Hackett, Mike Portnoy, and a ton of other amazing people. This is a spectacular track, a thoroughly great exaple of GK.
3. **Fairport Convention, “John Gaudie”**. A classic old folk tune performed by Fairport Convention.
4. **Martin Hayes, “The Crooked Road/The Foxhunter’s Reel”**. Martin Hayes is a phenomenal Irish
fiddler. In general, he plays things at a very reasonable pace, and is very sparse and elegant
in his ornamentation. This tune is pretty much his way of saying “Yes, I *can* play as fast and fancy as any of those snotty showoffs, I just usually *choose* not to.” Amazing musicianship, played with the same kind of elegance that characterizes his normal playing. I’m glad that he doesn’t do
*everything* in this showy style, but for a once-in-a-while thing, it’s positively brilliant.
5. **John Corigliano, “Etude Fantasy 4. Ornaments”**. A modern classical piece for piano written
by one of the finest composers in America. Corigliano isn’t an *easy* composer to listen to, but
he’s well worth the effort.
6. **Broadside Electric, “Bucimis”**. Broadside is a local-ish (Philadelpha/Central NJ) band that
plays electricified folk music. They specialize in old broadsides from Childe’s ballads, along
with Irish and Klezmer themed instrumentals. This is an instrumental track of theirs, which is
based on a *Bulgarian* folk dance in a meter of – get this – 15/16. (4 fast 2s, followed by one 3 that takes as long as two of the twos, followed by one more two; repeat until dizzy.)
7. **Psychograss, “Big Gravel”**. Funky newgrass from a Darol Anger led band consisting of some
of the most brilliantly twisted players in modern bluegrass: Darol Anger on fiddle, Mike Marshall on Mandolin, the great Tony Trischka on banjo, Todd Phillips on bass, and David Grier on guitar.
8. **Kate Bush, “Nocturn”**. A beautiful piece off of Kate’s latest.
9. **Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings, “The Seagull/Bay Day”**. Another brilliant effort from Darol Anger. The man has *such* a range!
10. **Marillion, “Interior Lulu”**. A wonderful, long piece from my favorite neo-progressive band. This one has a very interesting structure. It starts out with an intro that sounds very much like recent Marillion work. Then it flashes back into a sound like the genesis cover band that they were when they started out, and gradually changes until they sound like todays Marillion again by the end. Very, very cool.

By way of PZ, I just found [the website of Jonathan Coulton](http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songs/), a musician who seems to specialize in humorous and geeky songs. The music is good; the lyrics are absolutely fantastic.
Here’s an example that he gives away, called “Mandelbrot Set”. (For embedding it here, I drastically stripped it from 160K stereo sample to just 16K mono; go to his homepage to get the real, full-quality version.)

Just to give you an idea, here’s the lyrics for the first verse:

Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry
And a million miles away a butterfly flapped its wings
On a cold November day a man named Benoit Mandelbrot was born

Go. Listen. Buy!