Happy Monday, folks! It’s PSAT/SAT Week here at the school where I teach, which means I get to spend Wednesday administering a test. Joy. In the meantime, here are some tunes to help you get through the next seven days.

1. Stone Temple Pilots, “Big Easy”: Still follows the soft/loud dynamic of every band that ever heard the Pixies, but the incorporation of acoustic guitars and slide guitar is rather novel. I dig it.
2. Mount Eerie, “Ravens”: Part of a song cycle/album about the death of the singer’s wife, it’s soft and contemplative and bare bones in its instrumentation, like it was made for Saturday around 3:00 AM.
3. Buckingham Nicks, “Long Distance Winner”: Early work from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, pre-Fleetwood Mac, and the album is indeed hard to track down. It’s not available on any of the streaming services I checked, and even a CD version on Amazon was more money than I want to admit I spent on Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. But it’s damn good music, even if some of the lyrics are a little too simple most of the time.
4. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, “Breakdown”: Sometimes, I’m just in the mood for some good ol’ fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. And Tom always provides. Always.
5. The Smile, “Foreign Spies”: More electronic than their previous two albums, but what do you expect from 2/5 of Radiohead?
6. Jimmy Eat World, “Lucky Denver Mint”: Jumped up rocker is jumped up rocker.
7. Carole King, “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman”: I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a Carole King song that I didn’t like.
8. Louis Armstrong, “A Kiss To Build A Dream On”: If you don’t love Satchmo, I don’t think we can be friends.
9. The Clovers, “Love Potion No. 9”: This will always be the goofiest damn song to me. Dude drinks a love potion and ends up kissing a cop. Classic.
10. Glen Campbell, “MacArthur Park”: So apparently this song is based on the love story between Jimmy Webb (who wrote it) and Susie Horton. Horton was working at an insurance company office near – you guessed it – MacArthur Park at the time. It’s apparently symbolic of the end of the love affair, according to Webb, but that really makes me wonder what kinda kinky cake-related shenanigans they got up to. Also, original recording of the song was by actor Richard Harris, later of Dumbledore in Harry Potter fame.