Great harmonies and catchy melodies
I just put together my first iMix.
One of my favorite musical trios--Cindy Kallet, Ellen Epstein, and Michael Cicone--does gorgeous harmonies on songs ranging from the funny to the sublime. Some of their songs were written by Kallet, some are covers; some are a cappella, some accompanied by various instruments. And a lot of them are now in the iTunes Store.
So I made a playlist of a dozen of my favorites of their songs, and published it to iTunes under the name "Cindy Kallet sampler." (Even though the playlist doesn't actually contain any of Kallet's solo pieces--I also like those, but the iTunes Store doesn't yet have my favorite solo album of hers.)
I'm guessing that most of you are about to move on to some other page because you aren't into folk music. Before you do that, I recommend that you take 30 seconds to listen to the snippet of the first song on the playlist, "I'm a Mammal." It's the best, funniest, catchiest, and most Bobs-like song about breastfeeding that I've ever encountered, and a fair number of people with no interest in folk music have enjoyed it.
. . . As an experiment, I'm including a Flash widget that displays a nicely formatted rendition of the playlist, assuming you have Flash; sadly, you can't listen to the snippets from this widget, you have to click an item to listen to the snippet in iTunes.
I should note that a fair number of K/C/E songs are available elsewhere online as well. For example, as I noted last April, you can listen to the entirety of their latest album, Heart Walk online for free; if you like it, then you can order the CD directly from them for $15, or get instant gratification by buying it from the iTunes Store for $10. And if you click around from that page, you can listen to a couple of songs from each of Kallet's other albums.
Some of their songs can also be heard in full at StumbleAudio, but it's not clear to me how/whether one can choose listen to particular desired songs there.
(Side note about iMixes: I've tried to put together an iMix before, but in past attempts, iTunes hasn't had most of the songs I wanted to include. So part of why I did this one was that I was so pleased that all these songs were available.)
