Blog Posts by Robert of the Radish

I live smack dab in the heart of NASCAR country.

The new NASCAR Hall of Fame is just a 25 minute drive, and races are easily accessible. Ever since I moved to the Charlotte, NC area I've been promising myself that I would see a race. Well, it's 9 years later and I still haven't seen a single race. Sure, they have a reputation as being a drunken, redneck fests, but I still want to experience one, at least once in my life.

My home is not too far away from a red dirt track and on race nights we can hear the engines roaring.  Tonight is a race night. As I sat down to come up with a playlist I could hear the engines and I knew instantly that I must do a NASCAR playlist. Maybe tomorrow I will actually look at the race schedule and buy some tickets so I can experience NASCAR for myeslf. Even if I don't like it, something tells me my son will love every minute.

This playlist includes 10 songs that include the acronym NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) in the song title.

Are you a race fan? If so, what's your favorite NASCAR song?

DaffodilsLike many flowers, the daffodil is of great use to artists due to its strong symbolism. The daffodil is one of the first signs of spring that we see.  I've already said "hello" to the ones that live in my yard, as they've popped up with the arrival of  unusually warm weather.

Daffodils symbolize beauty, newness, rebirth, or new beginnings, and are also representative of the end of winter, warmth and prosperity. Receiving a bunch of daffodils is said to bring good fortune, but never give your lover a single flower as this traditionally means misfortune will befall the receiver.

Songwriters have taken to using the daffodil in song to represent many of these things, and for this playlist I've selected ten tracks that use the word "daffodil" in the song title.

What's your favorite "daffofil song" and what's your favorite "flower" song?

thumb2.phpWe've done a lot of playlists based on band names here at Yahoo Music.  You know a good name when you hear it, and there are thousands of horrible names that deserve to be ragged on as much as possible (I'm looking at you Limp Bizkit, Test Icicles and !!!). And even if you're not in a band, thinking of new band names is a fun pastime.  How many times have you heard some odd words put together and said, "that's a great name for a band!"? Okay, maybe you haven't, but music fanatics like myself do it all the time.

You can do lists of bands named after animals, insects, books, songs, monsters, or just about any subject you can think of.  For this playlist I was inspired by the Talking Heads, which I personally think is a great band that has a great band name. I was listening to The Best Of The Talking Heads today and started thinking about other bands named after parts of the body.

This playlist includes the first ten I came across.

What would you add?

Cartoona - A Creature-Building GameA lot of you may not be aware that I have a lot going on in addition to creating playlists for Yahoo. Today, I thought I would share another part of my life. Namely, my painting, and a brand new board game that I've invented. This playlist features 16 songs that had the heaviest rotation as I worked on my new project called Cartoona, a creature-building, tile-laying board game. It's a view into the kind of music that helps me focus, and provides the vibe I need to be creative. I claim no responsibility if it does not work for you in the same way.

Cartoona did not start its life as most board games do. Traditionally, a game designer has an idea for a mechanic, or a set of mechanics that are built upon, and a theme is layered on top. More rarely, the theme comes first with mechanics developed to fit.

With Cartoona the art came first. So it's already odd man out.

I've been painting my whimsical creatures for over 20 years now, and it's this experience from which the game was born. Sure, I could probably theme it with zombies, or Cthulhu, or vampires, or dragons and have a built-in audience millions of times greater than fans of my paintings. But the idea came from my art, and so it's with my art that the project will live or die.

Sometime in 1993, I started creating odd creature paintings which garnered some attention, so I continued. This led to a lot of mural work in the Southeast along with a few sold out gallery shows, including one with the late, great Howard Finster. I became prolific, sometimes producing 50 paintings or more in week long creative spurts. I made a living on my art by selling it at reasonable prices and making up for it with volume.

Eventually my creatures became second nature to me. I could draw one without thinking about it, I just put together different body part shapes to create a brand new one every time. The possibilities became endless.

It became an obsession, but selling art is hard. And raising a family on the economic ups and downs of an artist's income leaves you with a constant feeling that you could slip through the cracks at any moment.

So I got a real job in technology.

Gasoline is a powerful metaphor that's much loved in rock and roll. The reasons are obvious. Gasoline is volatile, it represents power and danger, it can explode at any moment, and it helps things go really fast. These are all things that rock & roll loves, especially rock on the harder edge of the spectrum.

There are a lot of great "gasoline" songs to choose from out there, but for this list I've chosen to limit my picks to only songs that are hard rock, not so hard that you would consider them heavy metal, but with plenty of electric guitar. I also chose to limit it only to songs with the word "gasoline" in the song title. You could easily expand the list if you added the words "gas" and "fuel", but there is something about the word "gasoline" that just sounds rawkin'.

Below are the 10 songs I have found, what would you add?

LawnmowerIt has been an unusually mild winter here in North Carolina. We can usually enjoy a couple snow days each year. When we do, the kids are out of school, so we break out the sleds and have a great day sledding down the old logging road in our back yard. But not this year, and although I'm still holding out hope, it doesn't seem likely that we will see snow this year. Heck, my daffodils have already popped up and some of the herbs in my garden are still growing! I suppose that's one of the benefits to a warm winter. However, one of the negatives, besides not having snow to enjoy, is the fact that I am already cutting the grass.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate cutting the grass, in fact I can really enjoy it when I get in the zone and the weather is nice, but I think I would rather have a few months where no mowing is necessary.  Today it felt like spring and the grass needed a trim, so I dusted of my trusty John Deere push mower, filled her with oil and gas and got to it. I love my mower -- it started up on the third pull after sitting all winter.

As I cut the grass and welcomed spring today I started trying to think of "lawnmower songs" and it was a challenge to be sure.

This playlist is my attempt at a 10 song lawnmower-themed playlist.

What would you add?

Valentine's Day is wonderful for people in love. But for the lonely, or those going through a breakup, it can be a horribly rough day. Although some people might rate alcohol or chocolate high on the must-have list of the broken-hearted, nothing helps people connect with the emotional aftermath of love lost better than music. And broken hearts have been the foundation for thousands of great songs.

Out of pain comes art.

We all have our favorite "sad songs", but when it comes to creating a list based on sales and popularity, there's one authority... Billboard. This year, Billboard has compiled a list of the all-time top 30 heartbreak songs in popular music history. The list is based on the performance of heartbreak songs in the Hot 100 since its inception in 1958. So the below are indeed the top 10 most important heartbreak hits according to Billboard's chart data.

After you check out the top 10 below be sure to peruse  all 30 over at Billboard.

What would be on your list of the top heartbreak songs ever written?

This week, in honor of Valentine's day, I've been putting together little packages of conversation hearts. To create one, just select a band and find song titles in their repertoire that would fit on a candy conversation heart. Meaning, they should be songs that fit both the theme of Valentine's day, and the limited space available on a candy heart. Some day I may try to get some licenses and do these myself. Seems like a great thing for music fans to give to their romantic counterparts.

But while we wait, enjoy these virtual versions.

Let's begin with an easy one: U2. This playlist includes my top ten U2 song choices for a U2 branded  box of conversation hearts.

What would be in your U2 candy heart box?