All Around Sound Is Turning Three! - Day 1: Rawkblog

In a little less than a week (March 10th to be exact), All Around Sound will be entering it's third year of operation. To help ring in the occasion I thought I'd offer another smattering of playlists belovedly curated by friends of the blog/myself as well as influencers of both my taste and the blog's direction on occasion.

Kicking off the week is Rawkblog, run by LA-based music journalist David Greenwald. My relationship with  Dave is one I wouldn't take likely. Our music tastes are separate for the most part connected at its strongest by a love of indie rock/pop. Dave's single-handedly responsible for me checking out Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel.... His biggest success/influence, to me at least comes in the form of his digital music club. For $2.99/month and a free subscription to Spotify, each week he sends out his picks for album of the week as well as an older album he feels pairs well with the album as well as a monthly mixtape. That's a lot of music.  In a lot of ways, Dave is responsible for the whole mixtape run on All Around Sound. He also gives some rather excellent behind the scenes help like advice on interviews. We may differ on a few hundred issues like what's an acceptable song of the year (Usher's "Climax" it is not) but overall, I have trust in Dave's taste and look forward to his weekly offerings.

Dave's Contribution - I Came All This Way:

I have a special place in my heart for "unpopular pop," a sorta-genre coined by Jon Brion and first applied to his circle of friends, collaborators and Largo players circa '99: people including Elliott Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, Badly Drawn Boy, Aimee Mann and others you, uh, probably haven't heard of. Brion's concept rings truer than ever: for bands not candy-coated enough for the mainstream but not fashionable or weird enough for the underground, it's easy to get left on the shelf. For this mixtape, I compiled some of my favorite unpopular pop: picks from underappreciated bands, secret classics from better-known acts and Trashcan Sinatras' "Freetime," the best Britpop song ever recorded, Coachella headliners be damned.