My Sweet Madeline, won’t you come and play in the street – the cars can’t touch you

I’ve been carrying around a whole stack of mp3s in my iRiver by an American songwriter called Aaron Schroeder for quite a while now. I’ve been trying to figure out which ones I should post here (I don’t want give you any old rubbish, you know), but to be honest they’re all pretty good.

Aaron Schroeder

To say Aaron Schroeder has had a chequered past, would be understating the case somewhat. He’s the first artist I’ve featured here who merits his own entry in Wikipedia, which if it’s to be believed, includes a spell as a bona fide porn star on his CV. You can read it here.

The songs are quirky little takes on life that are entertaining and often jaunty. He also reminds me of Nils Folke and his Lets Be Honeys. I’m often rather impatient with one man and his guitar-types, but there’s plenty to listen to these songs.

If you type “Aaron Schroeder” into Hype Machine, you’ll find that he’s been pretty well covered by many other (better) blogs than this one, and I imagine that may well be because he appears to be so extraordinarily generous about the number of tracks he gives away on his website and his Myspace page. Not to worry, as I say, it’s all good, and if I were you I’d snag as much as you can. (Actually, having just looked on his Myspace, there's another new song up there today!)

My pals at Letterbox are releasing Aaron’s new album, “Southern Heart in Western Skin”, and have an offer where if you buy the record, you can contact them and get a further bunch of unreleased recordings from the man. Quite a decent offer, I reckon, and having heard some of them I can vouch for them as being worth hearing. I actually prefer the unreleased version of “Ride In” which you can get if you buy the album.

Tempting as it is to post some of these unreleased tracks here, then they wouldn’t be unreleased any more, would they? (I’m also hoping to stay on the Letterbox goodies list…) So instead I’ve chosen a track from the new record, “Movin’ Movin’ Train”, and a couple of other corkers.

My Sweet Madeline

Ride In

A Movin’ Movin’ Train



But like I say, fill your boots, why don’t you?