The Bowdoin Orient

"Practice makes perfect." In this case, it's the definitive adage to describe Mike Doughty's career as a solo musician. This frontman of Soul Coughing rather unsurprisingly made the transition to solo musicianship after the group broke up in 2000, although surprisingly departed from bohemian rap/scat to try his hand with earnest acoustic balladry.

Mark Knopfler is a more seasoned gentleman at this point'56 years of seasoning, to be exact. But his latest solo album, Shangri La, is devoid of the kind of circularity and staleness that you'd expect from a guy who has been in the limelight of the popular music scene for a good two and a half decades.

With each run-through of Second Breakfast's self-titled debut album, I'm more and more convinced that this isn't just a cut from your typical pipe-dreaming college garage band. The four-man, one-woman ensemble of undergraduate musicians hailing from Bowdoin, Wesleyan, and Columbia humbly states that their music is "best described as an eclectic mix of pop, rock, funk, R&B, folk, jazz, and even classical." While their music is all that, it is also two heaping servings of smooth listenability, followed by the delicious dashes of lyrical irony and wit.

The impeccable taste and utter hipness of my roommate Luke are quite possibly the only reasons why this isn't my second consecutive month of listening to the Postal Service's Give Up on repeat. I like to think of Luke as the musical savior who drops into my life when I'm in dire straits and pulls me towards the light, away from the inane drudgery of routine listening.

We all know that person. There's one in every crowd. He is the dreaded greatest hits listener, and his music collection is limited to what has been identified as "album gold."

While I usually prefer to take my wine with cheese, there's certainly something to be said for Iron and Wine. Miami-born singer/songwriter Samuel Beam chose this unlikely moniker as his stage name, and whether by accident or intent, the quality of his music is very iron-y and wine-y: a mixture of roughness, delicacy, and unpretentiousness.

Ahh, springtime is here and love is in the air. As I was walking across the Quad this morning, I was distracted by notably loud, enthusiastic chirping overhead.