To steal a line from a latter day Billy Joel song-  when I listen to music I often go to extremes, partly due to mood, partly due to short attention span theater, but mostly because to me music is music.  It just has to have something, whether it oozes soul, a great guitar riff, a biting lyric, beautiful melody, a haunting vocal, or just an all out assault on the senses.  Granted I have my favorite genres and artists and as I’ve grown older my tastes haven’t necessarily changed too much but rather incorporated other palettes, so to speak.  And certainly, some of those palette shades may be bright and beautiful to some but may be fairly dark and grotesque to others, but that variety is the spice of life (or so they say).  Kinda like moving from that 8 pack of crayons to those new 120 pack boxes, so to speak.

So what am I getting at here?  Well, part of this is the reason I blog-  to expose some of you to artists that you may never have heard of, or maybe to get you “outside of the box” and push the realms of your comfort zone.  All music should be personal taste; just because a song is #1 on iTunes means you have to download it too or if an online or print band proclaims such and such artist as “the next Beatles” or “the new Michael Jackson” or “better than Bieber!” doesn’t mean you need to take notice and buy it because it’s the new flavor of the month.  All you gotta do is listen and determine…  how does it make YOU feel?  What are YOU getting out of it?  If it sucks, it sucks.  If YOU think it’s great, well, that’s all that matters.  And if you’re like me, you can listen to all of this back to back and enjoy the hell out of it!

Heed the words of The Dude and not Grumpy Cat!

So here ya go….  ten songs to get you outta your box and expose you to new things!  If you like it’s cool but if you don’t like it’s cool too.  Some of these may be familiar and some may not, so enjoy!