With the departure of Noel Gallagher from Oasis, ShortFormBlog is recommending this five-song set, including four Oasis tunes on which Gallagher sings and the Chemical Brothers’ “Setting Sun.” As usual, SFB has linked the whole thing to the online store at lala.com, making acquisition of these tracks much simpler.

Entertainment Weekly has a list (with playable samples, if you can get their widget to work) called The 50 Most Heartbreaking Songs of All Time, which drew many comments, mostly along the lines of “How could you leave off [title]?”

Of course, we’ve already made an attempt at such here.

From C-60 Low Noise (and isn’t that a great name?):

Prog Rock! Just the word makes some people nervous. Long haired nerds with lots of instruments and money, making music for themself down in some dark basement. But on the other hand, whats wrong with that picture! Prog Rock have always been the ugly stepbrother of Rock, but some of the biggest selling album in the world have been pure prog-rock. Dark Side of the Moon to just namedrop one.

They suggest six tracks, which in prog rock ought to run at least an hour total, and so they do. The closer is indeed from Pink Floyd, but not from DSOTM.

Jeff Robertson’s take on the legendary Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders:

The mix of artists even on a single one of these records [is] crazy diverse, and nothing is segregated by genre. On the early albums, you will quite literally find Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Randy Newman, James Taylor, and Gordon Lightfoot sharing the same record. This defies all notions of market segmentation.

Either they were really ahead of their time, reflecting how people would eventually put all those together on their mixtapes and iPods, or they just didn’t care.

They knew. They probably didn’t anticipate the iPod and its brethren, but they knew.

If you’re not familiar with the Loss Leaders, start here.

Margi recommends some tunes for the treadmill, leading off with Rick James’ “You and I” and ending with “Boogie Nights” by Heatwave. A little over an hour, if you can hold out for over an hour. (I’m pretty sure I can’t.)

Of course, utterly irresistible to me, what with all the dust on my heart. This comes from Muzzle of Bees, and it leads off, sensibly, with Frank Sinatra and “The Way You Look Tonight.” The tenth and final track: “Song to the Siren” by Tim Buckley.

Insight within:

The real sadness of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” comes not from the fact this guy and girl are totally done, but that this guy is so sure they’re done that he’s decided to phrase everything in negative constructions: “It ain’t no use,” indeed. But beneath the bravado, there’s hurt in him, too. The line that’s always haunted me is “You could have done better, but I don’t mind,” which sounds like precisely the sort of self-preserving rhetoric one expects from a ten-year-old who is trying to dismiss the fact that you just stole his toy. Or, you know, a twenty-two-year-old kid who’s had his heart broken.

It doesn’t change so much in one’s fifties, either.

John Cale, after departing the Velvet Underground, made solo records. A lot of solo records. Boiling down a nearly-four-decade career to a single CD-R would seem impossible, but Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter has taken a stab at it, with nineteen tracks, starting with two from the mostly-pastoral Vintage Violence, circa 1970, and winding up with two from 2005’s blackAcetate. Says Richey, “This isn’t much of an introduction but it is one killer CD.” I don’t doubt it.

Half a dozen of them, in fact: Hidden Track suggests six versions of the Beatles’ “Day Tripper”, including the classic Otis Redding recording. Better yet: no American Idol versions. For a B-side — “We Can Work It Out” was the nominal A-side — this is some seriously powerful stuff, even today.

I’ve always blamed the CD, which offers scant space for cover art: less than one-fifth the whole square foot you got with an LP jacket. However, this belief is not entirely universal.

If you’ve been through here before, you’ve probably noticed one or more of the Major Babes series, which includes songs incorporating girls’ names.

Captain Obvious, more of a purist than I, has restricted his mix tape to songs where the name is the entire title, starting with Dylan’s “Delia” (from 1993’s World Gone Wrong) and finishing with “Rebecca” by Summer at Shatter Creek, aka Craig Gurwich. Despite this restriction, the collection is far more eclectic than anything I’m likely to come up with. Highly recommended.