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.

This one sounds simple, ends up less so. The idea: create a fake band and their first album. Here’s how it works:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
   The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
   The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
   The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

I admit to having fudged a bit on the last item. Not wishing to step on some photographer’s copyright, I took the third photo in the current list with a suitable Creative Commons license.

Anyway, here’s the Wikipedia entry, here’s the quote (from its own page), and this is the original photo. Behold:

Not available on iTunes.

(Via Steph Mineart. Crossposted from here.)

Darrell “Whisky Prajer” Reimer has an eclectic mix to suggest, mostly but not entirely new stuff, from Bettye LaVette to the reconstituted Dinosaur Jr. Definitely worth your attention.

The Sound Salvation Army, who describe themselves as “a few crazy Canadians who think we know what’s best for rock and roll”, have kicked off their inaugural mix tape with four songs on the subject of radio, a phenomenon that you may remember used to be carried on actual radio waves.

They lead off with Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio,” which makes sense, and eventually they will have 13 tracks.

A lot to like in this announcement:

Every week we here at Cacophony Central will pick and choose the songs that have gotten us through the week. Sometimes there’s a rhyme and reason to them, other times, there’s not. We’ll let you decide if there’s a theme or not. Some of it is new, some old, some you’re heard of, some you probably haven’t, but seek out these tracks and we guarantee you some good times. Or at least a way to make you look as cool as us. If we could, we would post these up, but seeing as we don’t want the man looking down on us, we encourage you to go out and find some of these tunes, wherever they may be. We promise, you won’t be disappointed.

As arguments for mix tapes (and CDs) go, this is definitely one of the better ones: it covers all the major justifications, the ones you’d admit to and the ones you think to yourself. And the actual programs (the second one went up today) are pretty good, too.

Get your kicks, indeed: Steph’s put together a mix for a trip down the Mother Road, and the proposed cover art is truly wondrous. And you have to like anything which finds room for Voice of the Beehive’s “There’s A Barbarian In The Back Of My Car,” right?

Not a Bryan Ferry reference, but a description of this set of cover versions at Middledawn, including some well-known (Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss,” for instance) and some I’d not heard before (Dishwalla’s take on “Tainted Love”). Definitely worth some of your time, and you can actually listen to the tracks onsite.

Los Angeles Times sportswriter Christine Daniels has something like seventy-five tracks in this ongoing mix, and she’s posted 20 of them (so far) for public consumption. I’ll mention one here: “Black Metallic” by Catherine Wheel, which, says a friend of hers, is “the most majestic, awe-inspiring song of the 1990s,” and she’s not inclined to disagree.

Once in a while for no particularly good reason I will call out “Time!” as though I were doing my own version of the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” in which you hear this word shouted at regular intervals. (This particular lyric technique has largely fallen into desuetude: the most recent variation I can recall is the periodic call of “Science!” in Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science,” more than two decades ago. Updates will be welcomed.)

Time is also a good subject for a mix, and Monty has a two-disc mix of time-related songs, including most of the obvious ones (the Chambers Brothers were left on the shelf) and, in a stroke of genius, the Guess Who’s “No Time.” I will have to plunder this for a Time cycle of my own.