It's officially the day after.

For those of you who don't know, the day after is significant not as a precursor to Plan B, but rather as a sort of blogging flood barrier. The day after prevents overzealous people like me from posting three updates per minute (a la Twitter) and clogging up what few Friends Pages I am fortunate enough to infest. Of course, I'll likely write once or twice more as a means of procrastination, then abandon this poor beast mercilessly... for the fourth time since I became a member.

Ah, doesn't that put a spring in your step!

I've been looking for a way to enjoy music again. Not that I don't enjoy music, because I do. Only a jerk or a criminal wouldn't enjoy music. The trouble here is that, lately, my biggest exposure to new music has been through soundtracks. Movie scores and anime soundtracks, mostly. Yes, Yoko Kanno is a mighty woman, but even her albums deserve a break (especially seeing as I scorched iTunes' shiny gray gradients when her songs caught fire). What is a wayward audiophile to do? The iTunes Music Store, while useful in many respects, doesn't often suggest music I enjoy. The Billboard charts scare me (one too many VH1 specials), Amazon doesn't make sense anymore, and eBay only offers bootlegs.

Cue Pandora. As it turns out, I signed up with their service just as they launched some years ago and subsequently forgot they existed. Today was the day I rediscovered the magic.

Unlike other, "Would you like to listen to this? We think you might like this because you liked this other album by a completely different artist in an unrelated genre. Go ahead and listen to this suggestion for free and then we'll charge you $.99 before you realize the song is thickly encoded at a horrendous bitrate and dripping in DRM" services, Pandora has some real techno-magic behind it. It's all thanks to the Music Genome Project. I won't attack you with the details, but the concept is fun and fresh.

When I first joined, Pandora didn't have much of a library to draw from, which is probably why I never caught on. Today, however, they have a delicious smattering of eclectic stuff, and - most importantly - a healthy collection of Yoko Kanno's music. Now we're talking!

I created my very own Yoko Kanno Radio station, and now I'm listening to some pretty interesting tracks. I've never heard of any of the following artists, but they're now on my "buy these" list: 



That's it for tonight. I'm off to love me some Virginia Woolf.

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