Listen to the solo work of, say, John Lennon and Paul McCartney - or just about any other musician who used to play with a band - and it’s easy to see the value of collaboration. There are certainly people out there who can go it entirely alone and come up with something brilliant. But I’m continually amazed at how different - and usually better - a work of art is when different minds take hold of it.

On September 25th you’ll be able to get what will be one of the year’s best albums: Mood Swings by the Toronto band Small Sins. This video is a live performance of what will be the second track on the album, “Morning Face.”

People much cooler and more inside than I have known about Baltimore artist Dan Deacon since he began appearing at local clubs around 2003 or so, but he’s relatively new to me. Deacon has been described as an “absurdist” electronic musician for his goofy sense of style and flipped out, high-octane live performances.

The news that President George W. Bush has been suffering from Lyme Disease for more than a year really caught the attention of Daryl Hall, one-half of the world’s biggest-selling music duo of all time Daryl Hall & John Oates.

So for my third installment in a continuing series of mixtapes I decided to just put my iPod on random-play and take the first 20 songs it gave me. With a few minor edits, this is what it came up with.

With two-dozen uniformed members, The Polyphonic Spree is more like a small army than a band. True to its image, the Dallas-based group makes grand, symphonic rock with the exuberance of a heavenly choir.

In Jan. 2003 I promised myself I’d write and record an entire album. Somehow four years passed without me producing a single song. But earlier this year, with the RPM Challenge, I decided to do the entire album in just one month.

Piero Scaruffi has been a cognitive scientist, software consultant, poet and film historian. His Web site is a densely layered collection of head-spinning reviews, observations and lists.

Podington Bear is the performance name for a mysterious electronic artist releasing three new songs a week as a podcast. The elusive electronic artist doesn’t have a bio and has never revealed his (or her) real name.

I make mixed tapes only for the way they sound and the mood they evoke. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to come up with something no one’s ever heard before. You’ll likely know some or most of these tracks, but hopefully not in one package.