Sorry that the South-by-Shuffle hasn't exactly been a daily endeavor. As you can see, we've just launched a brand new SPIN.com over the weekend, so that took quite a bit of our time and energy. But now it's back-to-work, and back to the SXSW iTunes shuffle project.

From now through March 11, SPIN.com's Peter Gaston is chained to his desk, listening to almost 600 MP3s of SXSW 2008 performers on shuffle mode in iTunes, separating the wheat from the chaff. His findings will be posted daily.

While Spin certainly didn't love the last record by the Frames, Glen Hansard's long-time band of Irish rockers, his 2007 film, Once, found a soft spot in my heart on a recent cross-continental flight. Maybe it was the altitude -- I once bawled watching In Her Shoes on a flight back from the U.K., for no apparent reason -- but I found myself welling up as characters played by Hansard and Marketa Irglova find salvation in the recording studio during an otherwise bleak period in both their lives.

Full disclosure: I know an awful lot about Shudder to Think. If you do too, and want to skip down to the show review and videos, click here.

It's before noon on a cool Sunday in May, yet thousands of teenagers are wide-awake and restless. Gates of chain-link fence creak open, and a stretch of New Jersey's finest asphalt shudders with the rumble of rubber-soled Converse and Vans.

Warm weather has my iPod working overtime, on long subway rides to Coney Island, drives out of town, and through the daily grind. When it's not doing the lazy shuffle, the player is pumping out some of this summer's most crucial tunes in my little slice of world.