It’s one of the most frequently asked music questions around.  And it’s quite possibly one of the hardest to answer.  It’s the dreaded “you’re stranded on a deserted island, what music do you need to survive?” question.  Maybe it’s been asked so many times already that you have your stock answers ready to roll.  Maybe it’s a paralyzing question to ask in the first place.  But let’s see what happens.  Just keep in mind we need songs for our solar-powered cvilleMUSE iPod, not albums.  And believe me I could submit one hell of a long list, but I’m just going to limit myself to two or three tunes.  I’m probably not going to fire them off all at once, just in case something pops into my head out of the blue that I just couldn’t live without.  In the end, our collection of submissions is going to be our musical survivor kit, so chose carefully.

I know the answers to this question are as endless as π (pi) but let’s just have fun with it and see where it goes.  The real catch of course is that you may not be able to find videos for some of your all-time favorites.  We’ll just have to make due with what we’ve got.  So add your song suggestions in the comments box and send along a video URL with each song so we can put altogether for you in visual and musical form.  Good luck.  Our Songs for the Shores of Gilligan’s Island begins with your first selection.  [and on the chance that you end up submitting ten or twenty songs, I’m probably only going to use the first two or three, so make sure and put the goodies near the top of the list]

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Popularity: 43% [?]

Time for another mix tape.  This will be the sixth edition in our continuing series of reader submitted song selections.  I tossed around the idea of pulling out a previously submitted theme, but with the 4th of July coming up at the end of the week, I thought we’d use this particular mix tape to celebrate Independence Day.

There’s a lot of different ways we could go about this, but here’s where I think I’m going to take it.  We’re going to do a Side A and a Side B, with each side having a different theme.  I’m going to give you the Side A theme first.  Once we fill up Side A (10 songs), then I’ll give you the theme for Side B (10 songs).  Got it?  Hopefully by now everyone knows how this works.  As always, we add our gentle reminder:  Please add a video URL link with your song submission.  First come, first serve and in order to allow more folks to play:  1 submission per person per side.

SIDE A THEME:  Red, White, and Blue (songs with one or more of those words in the title)
SIDE B THEME:  Aint’ That America

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Popularity: 40% [?]

[Tonight I’ve got a couple of new songs for you and a couple of older ones.  It’s midnight, I’ve been on the road, driving the highway.  Just thinking about music, listening to it, holding the wheel.  Here are a few songs that have been driving my day.  Any songs been driving yours?]

I love driving at night in the summer.  I can feel the interstate stretching from here to the ocean.  The interstate has a rhythm.  You signal, you pass, one, two, you signal, you return, three, four.  Try counting the broken white lines in sixteens and thirty-twos.  The guardrail posts every eight beats.  The windows are rolled down with that sticky air that feels cool only because it’s moving at 70 mph.  Your light is the stereo, the instrumental panel, and on occassions the moon or the headlights of the car behind you.  Sometimes that when the songs sound the best. 

[After the break I’ve included a few songs heard and a few that would have fit in nicely, while taking a late night drive, heading east on I-64] »Read More

Popularity: 50% [?]

I really like to add these mixes to pages of MUSE because it really gets a lot of great responses from readers and it allows folks to throw in a little bit of their own flavor to the MUSE stew.  So let’s kick off the week with another Mixtape!  I was checking out a really cool L.A.-based blog over the weekend and they had done a series of posts on songs about shoes.  I hadn’t given it much thought until I saw it, but there really are a lot of tunes relating to footwear.

So let’s see what we can come up with.  Songs about shoes, footwear, boots, etc.  I’ll let you guys start.  First one in, gets the first song and so on and so on.  As always, add a video URL along with your song choice and let’s see where we end up.  We’ll call this one:  A Nice Pair of Kicks.  (and since shoes come in pairs, if you’ve got two songs that’s even better) »Read More

Popularity: 26% [?]