Justin/Scarlet Smoke Concepts

Like life, some of the best moments in music just happen, unplanned, unscripted and completely serendipitous. Such is the case with "New Beginning," the brand-new cut just dropped by a collection of talented friends from Denver's hip-hop scene. According to Mane Rok, who collaborated on the track with Riley Boone, Jon "Rhias" Shockness from Air Dubai, and A.V.I.U.S and Es Nine from Prime Element, the moment just presented itself one night when the guys all happened to be in the studio at the same time.

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We all have it -- that one song that stopped us in our tracks the first time we ever heard it, that continues to give us pause each and every time it's played. In our periodic feature, Deep Cuts, we share the personal stories behind our all-time favorite songs and how and why we came to love them. This time, Antonio Valenzuela waxes about Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again," a song that most of us associate with Tawny Kitean writhing seductively on the hood of a Jaguar, but one that takes on an entirely different meaning for him.

Sitting in a Denver city jail cell, face bloodied and in handcuffs, I made a vow to myself to change my life. I came to a breaking point of complete frustration and desperation, in which change was necessary, no matter the cost. My life was like standing on the edge of a cliff watching as everyone foolishly kept jumping off. Finally, before reaching the edge and taking a leap myself, I decided to resist the herd mentality and step out of line.

See also:
- "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" provides soundtrack to enlightenment/being fired
- Deep Cuts: On Oasis, people named Sally and why I will never look back in anger

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We all have it -- that one song that stopped us in our tracks the first time we ever heard it, that continues to give us pause each and every time it's played. We each have a song -- and a story that goes along with it. Deep Cuts is our latest feature, in which we share the personal stories behind our all-time favorite songs and how and why we came to love them.

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See Also:
- Deep Cuts: On Oasis, people named Sally and why I will never look back in anger
- Bob Dylan crashed in the Mile High City, 1960

For many, myself included, Bob Dylan is like a cool older brother, the kind who returns home from college freshman year with a stack of Captain Beefheart albums and a bag of marijuana, introducing you to foreign films and wine. In the fall of 2000, I was eighteen and had just voted in my first presidential election -- for George W. Bush. This coincided with my purchase of the Bringing It All Back Home album. Dylan was 23 when he wrote the songs for that record, and while at the time he was beginning to tour the world as the iconic "voice of a generation," it was only a few years earlier that he'd left his home town of Hibbing, Minnesota -- only a two-hour drive from where I'd grown up and was living in the year 2000.

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We all have it -- that one song that stopped us in our tracks the first time we ever heard it, that continues to give us pause each and every time it's played. Granted, some of us (see below) are a little more obsessive about these songs than others, but we each have a song -- and a story that goes along with it. Welcome to Deep Cuts, our latest feature, in which we share the personal stories behind our all-time favorite songs and how and why we came to love them.

During a middle-school trip to Europe, my early precursor to the iPod had a fit and gave up, not actually dying so much as bitterly refusing to play any song that wasn't Oasis's "Champagne Supernova" or the Cranberries' "Zombie." Had it been Dolores O'Riordan's yawl that called to every obsessive tendency I have, and not Liam Gallagher's, my modern life would not include a favorite band, an Oasis tattoo, or the unbroken streak of more than 3,000 days I have since made sure to listen to the song at least once before sleeping.

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Not to get all sorts of heavy on you here on this otherwise happy hump day (seriously, isn't the weather just picture-perfect today?), but this song by Martina McBride hit me in just the right way as I was driving earlier this morning, in the same way that countless others, like Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me," did once upon a time, and I thought I'd share it with you.

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Man, do we love robots. Especially when those robots are bringing us the latest and greatest DFA sounds. We've been wearing out our copies of LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening for a while now, and just as we're thinking it's time to give it a rest comes a new slice of brilliant DFA goodness, in convenient, robotic Song of the Day form!

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Oh, man, this is the goods! Have you heard the new Cee Lo Green cut, "F**CK YOU"? Gonna go ahead and call this now: This track will, in all likelihood, end up being my favorite song of the year.

Even though the song is reportedly the first single from Cee Lo's forthcoming album, The Ladykiller, I can't imagine it has a prayer of getting within a hundred feet of any radio playlist. It's a smash-in-waiting, though, by god, if programmers can somehow figure out a way to get past the blatant f-bombs without ruining the song.

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Weirdest thing: It was just the other day that we were thinking, "Man, the world needs more hip-hop-inflected tunes that use video game samples for the beats and video game metaphors to explain life." And then today, guess what we find? Yep, that exact thing. Coincidence?

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It's been three years since Radiohead released In Rainbows, and fans are getting kind of itchy to hear some new material. This past weekend at England's Big Chill festival, Thom Yorke scratched that itch -- maybe. He played a newish song called "Give Up the Ghost" (debuted in February, apparently, but we hadn't heard it before) that is thought to be a candidate for inclusion on the work-in-progress followup. So, how is it?

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Lucia De Giovanni

You've heard this sound before. It's nothing new or even particularly novel. At least it won't strike you as such, particularly if you own the first three U2 albums. Just the same, by god, does it sound absolutely fanfreakingtastic! These dudes just completely smash it on this cut! It's a little ditty called "Squeeze," and it's from an outfit led by Frankie Abbatecola called Monroe Monroe, rechristened from its previous moniker, the Legendary Beep Beeps.

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