Exclusive Daily Download: "Get Over Yrself," Oxygen Ponies
The Oxygen Ponies are the work of New York actor and musician Paul Megna, whose bio is an almost comically over-the-top catalog of misery: "Taught to play guitar by his friend Jeff Buckley after being shot in the neck by a sniper," "perfected his style during a seven month stretch in Sag Harbor after thwarting a girlfriend's suicide attempt," "decided to record this album upon ending a five year relationship just a few months before the scheduled wedding date." It's no surprise, then, that the music skews melancholy, with Megna often sounding heartbroken and a little dazed at his own loneliness, but it's also gorgeous, hazily atmospheric and intelligently written. "Get Over Yrself," on which Megna sounds a little bit more forceful, a little less lost and alone, and quite a bit like Joe Henry, stands out in part because of Don Piper's eerie production.
-- T.B.
Great literary podcasts:
"In Walked Bud"
Amiri Baraka
"The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"
Charles Bukowski
"The House on Mango Street"
Sandra Cisneros
"A Reporter's Life,"
Walter Cronkite
"An Open Heart," by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
"Robert Frost Reads"
Robert Frost
"In Harry's Bar in Venice"
Ernest Hemingway
"The War on Drugs"
Bill Hicks
"I Have a Dream"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"King of Horror"
Read by Stephen King
"Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
"Long Walk to Freedom," by Nelson Mandela
Read by Danny Glover
"Shopgirl"
Steve Martin
"All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Brad Pitt
"The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison
"Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
"The Bell Jar,"
Sylvia Plath
"The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe
Read by Basil Rathbone
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," by JK Rowling
Read by Jim Dale
"Everything"
Henry Rollins
"Fast Food Nation," By Eric Schlosser
Read by Rick Adamson
"Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Dylan Thomas
"Slaughterhouse Five"
Kurt Vonnegut
"Hooking Up"
Tom Wolfe
Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
