I've been inundated by good music of late. And few of the songs are the kind of music I usually listen to. It all started when I went for lunch with a 40-year-old colleague who has pretty good taste in music. He happened to mention that he had purchased Lily Allen's album over the weekend. When my only response was to look at him blankly, he took it upon himself to further my musical education, as he termed it, by recommending a couple of Lily's tracks, such as Smile, which I realised I have heard before on the radio but it hasn't really caught my attention, and LDN, which I have now fallen in love with for its happy, bouncy, Calypso-like melody and incredibly poetic lyrics. C'mon, when someone manages to rhyme 'Tesco' with 'alfresco', you've got to give them bonus points for writing. And the song encapsulates perfectly how I feel about London. It's grimy, it's crime-ridden, it's dark and grey, as the lyrics state. But London makes me happy nonetheless, just like the melody of the song.

While Googling Lily Allen, I stumbled upon an MP3 blog, Without Sound, via this entry where you can sample a couple of Lily's tunes. And after browsing through a couple of the earlier entries, I came across this post which linked to My Old Kentucky Blog, a blog I visited once before to download a whole bunch of covers of Hallelujah. To my delight, I found out that MOKB also had a couple of other delightful covers and of course, I promptly downloaded quite a few of them. My current favourites are the acoustic version of Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence and Joss Stone's cover of Beach Boys - God Only Knows. Both of them completely blew me away.

Speaking of covers, Belle and Sebastian's cover of David Bowie - Space Oddity ( a song used to great effect in C.R.A.Z.Y., I might add) is also rather endearing. You can find it at Music For Kids Who Can't Read Good.

There. I've done my best to spread the love of the songs I'm currently into. I hope you enjoy them!