I am listening to the Bee Gees right now and feeling giddy and foolish. I think I like them far too much. I keep thinking about Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake impersonating them on SNL, so I know I should be snickering more than anything, but instead, I'm loving it. Also, The Styx and "Come Sail Away"... Hell, yeah!

(I just picked up an MP3 player for my mom and Tina and Candice and I are having fun thinking of music to load onto it. Our mom likes artists like Blondie, ABBA, The Beatles, and the Bee Gees, so I'm having a blast listening to this stuff and picking the best ofs. Basically, I'm pretending to be my mom at seventeen. Try and get your head around that!)

Last week, I made my first donation to KEXP. It was long overdue. John and Cheryl (and tonight, DJ Riz) have been helping me through tough times. I felt it was only right.

The CD changer in my car has been broken since late last summer (or whenever it was that I last vacuumed it out in front of the house), and I would rather try to fix it myself than buy a new stereo. I firmly believe that my car has not yet been broken into because no one is interested in my stereo from 1995. It's just not worth it; how much crack can you really buy from pawn shop proceeds for that old thing? I refuse to entice anyone with a shiny new stereo. A once-over of my current deck doesn't even reveal that there's a CD player component. All you can see is that there's a tape player. (The only good music tape I still have from my youth is "Pablo Honey" and I'm not even sure where that is at the moment.)

In addition to a snazzy tape player, I also have a radio. In the past few months, since we stopped listening to John in the Morning on the alarm clock radio, I've been listening to it in the car on the way to work. I often listen to Cheryl, too, since what time I wake up seems to have no bearing whatsoever on when I leave the house... When I'm not listening to KEXP, I'm listening to lame radio or road noise. (Lately, I've been kind of burned out on karaoke and haven't been trolling my usual "karaoke stations" for fodder. Tina would be shocked to know that I haven't even been listening to Delilah for the choice karaoke ballads since December.)

John and Cheryl do the greatest job of putting together playlists that mix songs I haven't heard in ages with songs that turn me on to new music. They play music that other stations don't play. They find and play music by superstars who aren't actually superstars (yet). They stream on the Web, but the hands-down best feature of KEXP's site is their playlist. Just last Friday, I was able to cross-check a song on my computer against their playlist and confirm that I was first introduced to one of my new favorite artists on April 19, 2002 during the 10 o'clock hour. Where else can you do something like that?? ("New" only because I am lazy about buying CDs and Mirah finally has several albums available on Rhapsody and I can finally confirm that she is indeed awesome! She was featured on Rhapsody last week as "one to watch". How behind are they??)

So, last week, KEXP had one of their pledge drives. I already pay for Rhapsody (a big deal for me since I'm generally anti-monthly-payments). It occurred to me that I wouldn't get nearly as much out of it if I didn't have KEXP constantly feeding me new artists to investigate. I realized that I owe them big.

Peter and I both have been trying to donate to more non-profit organizations every year. KEXP is my latest. I've also been meaning to donate to "This American Life" for the past couple years. They're definitely next. TAL is transfixing. It's so horrible to have to get out of the car in the middle of a program that I often stay to finish a segment before racing into the house to hear the rest. I once set out to hear every program in their online archive (which goes back to November 1995), but it was too distracting at work and too weird to just sit in front of the computer at home to listen to a radio program. If I could stream every last episode of "This American Life" in my car, accomplishing this task would be that much easier. Until there's a way to do that, I'll just have to stay friends with my radio stations (and Tiffany, if I'm ever lucky enough to find that tape again).