Happy Puppy turns 7!

Hey... we're seven years old!

Happy Puppy went online April 10, 2006... and since then we've been so pleased with the reaction the music we've released has had. Never thought it would really get this far...

Anyway, to celebrate we've cooked up something for the all the lo-bit fans out there: every Happy Puppy album and single in one massive 16-bit box set!

That's right.. 69 albums, 17 singles, 610 tracks, 41 hours, 44 minutes and 5 seconds!

You get the very first release by Lee, all the way up to an advance copy of the most recent album that won't be available until later this month... all in squashy 16-bit audio. The whole shebang comes to about 300 mbs, which is waaay smaller than what the site would normally take to download.

However, we strongly caution that this be for lo-bit fans, or people wanting to sample the site quickly. The sound quality has been extremely compromised...kind like those K-Tel or Rondo records were they packed in a ton a of songs on one side of a record. It sounded like crap, didn't it? Well at least you got to hear lots of music.

So with that in mind, please note this box set is not a replacement for the high-quality files that live on the individual release pages... no way! But it is a little fun way of saying thanks for all the hits, the downloads, the emails, and to all the musicians who have generously shared their music with me and you.

Happy 7th birthday... or 41 in dog years.

The Wonderful and the Obscure Volume 1: Rodd Keith

This compilation of song-poems by the great Rodd Keith is from the private collection of Bob Purse, music-lover and music-maker (see "The Many Moods of Bob Purse").

I’ve been a fan of Rodd’s a little over 15 years, when I first heard the MSR Madness CDs, and started collecting whatever song-poems I could. In Canada, there aren’t a lot of them to be found.. I imagine they are much more common in the USA (given the nature of many of the poets were from the States, this isn’t surprising).

However, it does make it difficult to discover them – ebay auctions have gotten tremendously over-priced since the PBS "Off the Charts" songpoem story documentary, and that’s why I can thank Bob for sharing his massive collection on his blog The Wonderful and the Obscure.

He posts not just Rodd Keith tracks, but many many other wonderful gems that you should really visit his site to find for yourself. However, since I’m a big Rodd fan and Bob’s online archive is massive, I thought it would be fun to put together this compilation of Rodd’s tracks that Bob has previously shared and I also thanks Bob for giving me permission to do this.

Some of the tracks might not seem all that special, or "weird", but not everything Rodd did was like that. Despite that, there are always little moments in the songs that make them special and make them distinctly unique to his productions.

As Bob puts it, "I'm not really part of the Rodd cult - I enjoy his records about on a par with any other song-poem artist or label, loving some and finding others deadly dull, and everything in between - but I know I'm in the minority with that viewpoint."

Download it here!