Sirius XM Radio

When I purchased my present car about two years ago, I got a Sirius XM radio with it. A very cool feature is that I can get channels much, MUCH farther away from home than before. I managed to get my usual station, WXPN (88.5 FM), all the way up into central New Jersey. I would have preferred to have gotten the Sirius channel 741 – The Village, their only Folk music station, but that's only available on a home set, not on a car set. I settled for a near substitute, channel 31 – The Coffee House. It was okay. My sister was riding with me a few months ago and complained about hearing the same songs over and over. I agreed that the station was a bit repetitive.

Recently, my radio got re-set to the zero station, so I switched around and listed to a few different stations. Settled on channel 27 – Deep Tracks, a rock 'n' roll station. Naturally, they play all of the really big hits, but one thing I really like about it is that they play a lot of secondary songs too, songs where I could immediately identify the artist, but not the particular track they were playing. One doesn't usually hear those songs on the radio.

Artists like Madonna play songs that you either hear ALL the time or they play completely forgettable tunes that one dismisses immediately. Artists like The Bangles play lots of in-between songs, songs that are enjoyable, but you can see why they're not super-awesome mega-hits. And yes, naturally, I collected lots of Bangles albums, but no Madonna ones.