SnowflakeIn winter, it's hard to avoid news stories about snowstorms causing a whole lot of trouble somewhere. From school and work cancellations, to power outages and car accidents. Snow can wreak havoc on a community. But for all of its destructive power, snow is beautiful -- especially in the morning before the masses have had a chance to trample and transform it into dirty slush. But to see the true beauty of snow you have to look closer, down to the level of the individual snowflake. The image in this blog is of a real snowflake, created by nature and completely unique.

Snowflakes are a great device for the songwriter since they represent beauty, purity, uniqueness and delicateness. For this playlist I've pulled together 10 songs that all use the snowflake to some degree. Most, but not all of them sound delicate and fragile, just as you would expect.

What would you add?

The North PoleWith the exception of the Santa's village, the North Pole is quite a lonely place. It's a place where the ground is not earth, but 100% ice and snow - over 9 feet of it. The nearest inhabited land is over 500 miles away.  It's one of two points on the planet where all lines of longitude meet, so if you were going to set your GPS to get to the North Pole, you would simply enter 90°N --  any longitude will do. The North Pole is cold, with average temperatures around −29 °F, but it's not as cold as the South Pole where the average winter temperature is −72 °F. Yep, the North Pole is a veritable tropical vacation land in comparison to the South Pole.

Of course, everyone knows that the North Pole's association with Christmas has everything to do with Santa. And although the citizens of Norway, Greenland and other Northern countries claim that Santa is a resident of their nation, he actually lives at the North Pole. He, his wife and their elves are true citizens of the world since no country owns a claim on the North Pole.

So while Santa is in the midst of his busiest time of year, I put this playlist together in honor of his home.

badsingingI love all kinds of music. In fact, I'm such a music fanboi that I have an extremely high tolerance for bad music. From time to time I've been know to listen to  Europe's 1986 album The Final Countdown in its entirety. I can sometimes be found passionately defending the music of Journey, and one of the first music sites I ever did was called The Worst of the Worst, where I hunted for the worst unpublished music I could find.

But even with this background I have my limits.

There are some songs so bad they actually produce a physical reaction in me. When I hear one the reaction starts with the smell sesame sticks.  I attribute this odd illusion to a (mostly) repressed childhood memory. You see, when I was about six or seven, I had eaten a bag of sesame sticks right before going on a long, hot car ride. A car ride that, unfortunately, included an 8-track tape of the 70s soft rock outfit Bread. I became horribly car sick and projectile vomited that bag of sesame seed snacks all over our car's beautiful, beige vinyl bench seats . That smell  of sesame and vinyl comes flooding back whenever I hear a particularly horrible song even today. This is usually followed by  a gag reflex, which can sometimes result in mouthful of chunder.

It's a truly unfortunate affliction.

This playlist includes the top 10 songs that produce said reaction. I just pray it never finds its way into the hands of my enemies.

Depeche ModeMy earliest musical memories come from way back in grade school, when even a fifth grader could feel the palpable tension between the disco and rock & roll crowds. I think it may have been the Rolling Stones Some Girls album that cemented my young identity soundly with rock & roll. And when the 80's came I was not keen on all the synthetic music, but Depeche Mode changed that for me. I had already been falling for alternative rock bands who used "real" instruments like R.E.M, U2, The Cure and The Smiths, so when I heard Depeche Mode for the first time, it just fit. I realized that it doesn't matter what implements a band makes their sounds with, but that it sounds good.

And Depeche Mode didn't just sound good, they sounded great.

Depeche Mode really opened my mind and taught me that you could like different genres of music. You didn't have to pick between rock, or jazz, or disco, or electronic music. You could enjoy it all. My hunch is that Depeche Mode had the same impact on a lot more people than just I. In fact, if I had to guess, I would put the number in the millions. Their songs are just that good. So good, that it's not hard to find remakes of Depeche Mode songs around every corner.

This playlist includes 10 Depeche Mode covers that I find worthy. What would you add?