Valentine's Day Songs for the Single and the Not-Single

(Okay, I didn't know what I was supposed to say there. Honestly, "Not-Single" was the best I could think of)

Ladies and gentleman, it is that time of year again! The time when flower and chocolate sales go up really high, when everything thing turns pink, and when you can't turn around without seeing something heart-shaped. Yes, I'm talking about Valentine's Day, a holiday with the sole purose of celebrating love.

Alright, full disclosure - I've never really cared for Valentine's Day. And before you write me off as a bitter teenage girl, let me explain. Usually, I just kinda saw it as an excuse to get free candy from V-Day card exchanges with my friends (of course, most of it was just bland lollipops and Fun Dip). I'm kind of too old for that now though, so this lovely holiday (pun not intended) has become pretty useless to me.

Also, I can't stand people who write stuff like "Happy Singles Day. #foreveralone"

Anyways, the point of this post was not to talk about Valentine's Day and what I think about it. The point is, I've compiled a list of songs for you to listen to this Valentine's Day, whether you're single, married, in a relationship, whatever. I'm compiled this list from my own resources (like the CD rack next to my computer).

And, as a fair warning, there are duplicate artists (for example, Flyleaf shows up once on both lists).

Click the jump to see the list!

Christmas Music

It's that time of year again. The time when your local radio station plays the same set of Christmas songs over and over and over again until you're ready to punch Rudolph in the nose. Well, I may have the solution for you.

Now, I have nothing against Christmas music. It's just that... Well, it's often overplayed or repetitive. I've made my own Christmas music playlist of songs by some of my favorite bands, whether they're original or covers of other songs.

For starters, if you like bands like Hawk Nelson, Switchfoot, Anberlin, Kutless, Thousand Foot Krutch, or Sanctus Real, then you should check out the album X Christmas. It's part of the X series of compilation albums put out by BEC recordings, and it features all of the artists mentioned above, plus a few more. A lot of the songs are covers, but there are a few originals like "His Favorite Christmas Story." You can listen to the entire album here.

Want more Christmas music? Click the jump!

Dear Diary Outfit

Gasp! It's Tuesday, and I'm blogging already?! Don't worry, the Friday post will come on Friday, just like it always does. I just really wanted to share something really quickly with you guys.

Dear Diary outfit on Polyvore

I was listening to the FM Static album Dear Diary today (on my iPod though, since I lent the CD to a friend), and I decided it would be really cool to make an outfit on Polyvore based on the two characters.

For those who don't know, Dear Diary is a concept album, which means it tells a story. Through the songs and the fictional journal entries in the CD booklet, Dear Diary tells the story of a boy, Aero (I promise, that's his name), who moves to a new town, meets a girl who is known as "E.T." throughout the rest of the story, and other events in his life. I'm honestly not sure how to summarize all of, but there's an interview with Trevor McNevan about Dear Diary that I thought was interesting.

With that out of the way, I suppose I should explain the outfit a little bit. Click the jump for more!

CCM Magazines

An article about Flyleaf from the Feb '06 issue

Hey guys! I never posted about my amazing find (well, amazing to me at least), so I thought I would do that now. Anyway, I was looking through some stuff in my youth group's classroom, and I found a stack (ten total) of old CCM magazines! CCM Magazine is a Christian music magazine that used to be published physically, but they stopped doing that in 2008. You can subscribe to the online version of the magazine now, though. So obviously, my copies of the magazine are pretty outdated (the newest one is from July 2007) but it's still a lot of fun to read through them. Unfortunately, I couldn't find much about Skillet, but there is one article from the February 2006 issue that talks about Flyleaf when they were first getting started. I scanned it, so there it is on the right (you can click the image to make it bigger so you can read it). 

Five questions with Trevor McNevan.

The other thing I found interesting was a short interview with Trevor McNevan from Thousand Foot Krutch and FM Static in the December 2004 issue. It's just five questions, but it's pretty fun to read. My favorite is #4, haha.

Anyway, I thought this would be fun to post today. Enjoy the scans, and if I find anything else interesting, I'll let you know!

Note: In order to make the articles big enough to read, you can click them, which will open the picture in a sort of slideshow thing, then right click the picture and press "view image." It should then open up an a way that you can zoom in on the text :)