1. Come on Eileen- Save Ferris

• "At this moment you mean everything, with you in that dress my thoughts I confess, verge on dirty, ah come on Eileen. Come on, Eileen too-loo rye-aye come on, Eileen too-loo rye-aye, toora toora-too-loora...wooaah Eileen." Poor old Dexy's Midnight Runners. They never were able to muster up another hit single and faded into oblivion. They now qualify as one of the greatest one hit wonders of all time. "Come on Eileen" would have to rank among the ten best singles from the 1980s. Save Ferris gave "Come on Eileen" the royal ska treatment in 1997. More specifically they gave it a 3rd wave ska reworking. You know, 3rd wave ska building on the 1st wave and 2 Tone ska movements. My favorite part of the original (the whole thing is brilliant) is the breakdown. The tempo slows, the instruments take a back seat to the Eileen too-loo rye-aye vocal round, then the tempo swells and climaxes into the chorus. The Save Ferris remake doesn't give us the same tempo build in the breakdown but in general it matches the frenetic energy of the original.

2. A Beautiful Mess- Jason Mraz

• "Although you are biased, I love your advice, your comebacks they're quick and probably have to do with your insecurities, there's no shame in being crazy, depending how you take these, words I'm paraphrasing this relationship we're staging." Sometimes it takes hearing a song live to realize that it's good or to realize just how good it is. I never realized how sweet BNL's "Jane" was until I heard it live and everything clicked. Another case in point is Jason Mraz's "A Beautiful Mess". The 1st time I heard it live would have been in 2008 at the historic Tower Theatre in lovely Upper Darby, PA. I can remember after that show hearing a fellow concert goer on a cell phone say "I just saw Mraz...that sh#t was bangin' yo". Indeed that sh#t was bangin'. "A Beautiful Mess" was the emotional high point of that show and plays the same role on the "We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things" album. This song is easy to play on guitar but the vocal is pretty impossible to pull off well. Any attempts I've made at performing "A Beautiful Mess" have been a hot mess.

3. Elizabethtown- Ryan Adams

• "Well I was born (in) Elizabethtown and I moved on a west bound freight train, with everything to prove, everything to prove, and nothing to lose but the sound of the thunderstorms breaking, breaking all over Elizabethtown." Ryan Adams released 3 albums in 2005; "Cold Roses", "Jacksonville City Nights" and "29". In his spare time he recorded another album's worth of material so he could lend a song or two for the soundtrack to the motion picture "Elizabethtown". The unreleased "Darkbreaker (Elizabethtown Sessions)" collect these recordings. The collection features a number of songs that were re-recorded for "Easy Tiger" ("Two", "Everyone Knows") and for the recently released "III/IV" ("The Sewers At The Bottom of Wishing Wells", "Cemetery Hill"). I adore the version of "Everyone Knows" (later known as "Everybody Knows" on "Easy Tiger") found here. The one song from these sessions that did make it's way onto the movie soundtrack is "Words"; the rest remains unreleased. I don't own the soundtrack and despite rumors to the contrary I have never seen the film.