Free and Legal mp3 Downloads

Please enjoy these songs from 2008, and then buy the artists’ albums. Stella Splice has made this post a page, accessible at the top of the blog, that you can check for updates throughout the year.

To download, click on the link, and on the resultant page scroll down just a bit until you can click on the orange Download Now button. Scroll down on that next page until you see “Your download should begin shortly. If it does not, try Download file now.” It never begins without me clicking on that link. Have fun!

American Music Club ~ All Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco
Band of Horses ~ No One’s Gonna Love You
Basia Bulat ~ In the Night
Benji Hughes ~ So Well
Benji Hughes ~ You Stood Me Up
Benji Hughes ~ Why Do These Parties Always End Up the Same Way?
Benji Hughes ~ The Mummy
Benji Hughes ~ I Went with Some Friends to See the Flaming Lips
Bodies of Water ~ I Guess I’ll Forget The Sound, I Guess, I Guess
Bowerbirds ~ In Our Talons
Brazos ~ Mary Jo
Dirty on Purpose ~ Mind Blindness
Dr. Dog ~ The Ark
Dr. Dog ~ The Old Days
Fleet Foxes ~ White Water Hymnal
Howlin’ Rain ~ Dancers at the End of Time
Iron & Wine ~ Innocent Bones
James Hunter ~ Jacqueline
Jens Lekman ~ The Opposite Of Hallelujah
Jens Lekman ~ Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo
Jim White ~ Crash into the Sun
Kaki King ~ Two O’Clock
Ladytron ~ Black Cat
Lykke Li ~ Dance Dance Dance
Man Man ~ Top Drawer
Mates of State ~ My Only Offer
Mike Doughty ~ 27 Jennifers
Mike Doughty ~ I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress
Morning Benders ~ Crosseyed
Mudhoney ~ I’m Now
Mudhoney ~ In ‘n’ Out of Grace
My Brightest Diamond ~ Inside a Boy
My Morning Jacket ~ Evil Urges
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ~ Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
Nina Simone ~ Revolution
No Age ~ Eraser
Oxford Collapse ~ The Birthday Wars
Port O’Brien ~ I Woke Up Today
Ra Ra Riot ~ Dying Is Fine
Saul Williams ~ Sunday Bloody Sunday
Saul Williams ~ World on Wheels
Science for Girls ~ Northern Lights
She & Him ~ Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?
Shearwater ~ Leviathan, Bound
Shearwater ~ Rooks
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin ~ Think I Wanna Die
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks ~ Baltimore
The Acorn ~ Crooked Legs
The Acorn ~ The Flood, Pt 1
The Breeders ~ Bang On
The Dandy Warhols ~ The World The People Together (Come On)
The Dodos ~ Fools
The Dodos ~ Jodi
The Dutchess & the Duke ~ Reservoir Park
The Mountain Goats ~ Sax Rohmer #1
The Republic Tigers ~ Buildings and Mountains
The Whigs ~ Right Hand on my Heart
Tilly and the Wall ~ The Freest Man
Tilly and the Wall ~ Cacophony
Tokyo Police Club ~ In A Cave
What Made Milwaukee Famous ~ Resistance Street
White Hinterland ~ Dreaming of the Plum Trees
Wolf Parade ~ Call It a Ritual
Wolf Parade ~ Language City

If you own a copyright and would like your mistakenly posted song to be removed, or if one of the links is not working, please contact Stella Splice.

Kurt Cobain: About A Son

I’ve been geeking out on the soundtrack for Kurt Cobain: About a Son. I can’t speak to the way the songs articulate with the film, because I haven’t seen it, but I have gotten a lot of enjoyment from listening to and thinking about the artists that influenced KC.

Buy the About a Son CD or DVD for reasonable prices. The trailer for the documentary pulls from 25 hours of interview tape done for Michael Azerrad‘s biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. (His other book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, follows Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Beat Happening, The Replacements, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Fugazi, and Mudhoney.)

Azerrad wrote the liner notes to the soundtrack, which contains no Nirvana songs but instead other artists’: “stuff he studied and worshiped and adored … So if watching About a Son is like seeing the world through Kurt’s eyes, then listening to this music is like hearing it through his ears.” I think fans will appreciate the amount of respect this choice shows for them and their ability to do the mental labor of analyzing influences and processing the clips of KC speaking that are sprinkled among the songs.

In particular, I like the inclusion of the Creedence Clearwater Revival cut Up Around the Bend because KC’s first band was a CCR cover band. CCR was logical, in retrospect, according to Azzerad, because it’s “basic, chunky guitar music, easy to play and yet boundlessly resonant, full of simple, catchy melodies and a singer with a voice that sounded like a tuned scream.” Nicely put. And when the CCR is juxtaposed against Put Some Sugar On It by Half Japanese (download), the Nirvana sound emerges around the margins.

Two songs that Nirvana covered are included: the original David Bowie version of The Man Who Sold the World (download) and Son of a Gun by The Vaselines. If you’re interested, Matt Yglesias talks about Nirvana covers of Vaselines songs here.

Of course Mudhoney (download Touch Me I’m Sick) and Lead Belly (The Bourgeois Blues) are on there. But I was unpleasantly surprised to note the absence of The Pixies and The Breeders, who influenced KC mightily. The Pixies’ lyrical ambiguity (for a discussion of that, see the 33 1/3 book for Doolittle) is what lets Nirvana go national; it made the angst malleable to any set of personal circumstances, to anyone who thought that the world and/or themselves were SNAFU central.

My only other complaint is the incongruous cut by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service; his unmistakable voice concludes the CD with the song Indian Summer, and it sort of leaves me lost. I would have liked to see something more assertive or definitive as a closer. He helped compile the songs on the CD, so this track sort of feels like when a first-time film director gives him or herself a cameo.

But, regardless, the thing is worth buying. And in case you aren’t convinced yet, check the list of artists on the soundtrack I didn’t even talk about: R.E.M., The Melvins, Bad Brains, Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, Arlo Guthrie, and Iggy Pop. Whew!