I first heard Eli "Paperboy" Reed (nee Eli Husock) when one of his songs was in a Salon song competition with Hallelujah the Hills, who I interviewed last year. About twenty seconds into his song, I started Googling him and was surprised to learn that he was from Brookline, Massachusetts, one town over from me in Jamaica Plain. By the time I finished listening to the song, I wanted to know more: how did a guy so young learn to infuse so many great influences and be able to turn it back into something that is both familiar and exciting?

Exposed to a lot of great soul, rhythm and blues, country, and gospel music from his father, former Boston Phoenix writer Howard Husock, Reed became a fan of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Al Green as well as becoming something of a historian about less-known musicians working in all of these American genres.

Several years ago, right after my wife and I moved to Boston, I did some work with John McGah and a group of wonderful volunteers on fundraising events for Give US Your Poor, a project taking on homelessness. To quote their statement, "The Give US Your Poor mission is to create a revolution in public awareness, dispel myths and inspire action towards ending epidemic homelessness in the United States. It works to affect change at the policy level, engage volunteerism and contributions at the individual and corporate levels through media, technology and education; and to funnel support to partner homeless organizations."

Give US Your Poor is an initiative of the University of Massachusetts Boston. McGah is the founder and Executive Director of Give US Your Poor, a former Senior Research Associate at UMass Boston's Center for Social Policy, and is a recipient of a 2002 International Eisenhower Fellowships.

Released by Appleseed Recordings in September 2007, the Give US Your Poor CD is a diverse and powerful collection of songs featuring collaborations between homeless and formerly homeless musicians and celebrity artists, including Jon Bon Jovi, Buffalo Tom, Mario Frangoulis, Danny Glover, Jewel, Sonya Kitchell, Natalie Merchant, Mighty Sam McClain, Keb' Mo', Madeleine Peyroux, Bonnie Raitt, Tim Robbins, John Sebastian, Pete Seeger, Michelle Shocked, Bruce Springsteen, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Dan Zanes (who Well-Rounded Radio interviewed a few years back).

I first discovered the music of the band Ida in kind of a backward way. As a dad with crazy snobby tastes in kid's music, I had heard Dan Zanes had started making family music about seven years ago when my daughter was born. As a fan of his from The Del Fuegos, I got the chance to interview him for Well-Rounded Radio in 2004. When I asked him about other artists playing "good" family music, Elizabeth Mitchell's name rose to the top (as did Ella Jenkins, who has also become a favorite of my clan).

Not long after I saw Mitchell and her husband, Daniel Littleton, perform a terrific concert at FirstNight Boston in a cavernous convention room and picked up her first two CDs, You Are My Flower and You Are My Sunshine. Any band that plays Velvet Underground covers for kids is alright with me. I was hooked. Digging a bit, I discovered that Mitchell and Littleton actually got started out playing music in the slow core band Ida, so I picked up a bunch of their earlier CDs and was equally blown away. I'll attribute the fact that I was living on the west coast for the latter part of the 90s for why this Brooklyn-based band wasn't on my radar sooner, but Ida has an impressive catalogue.

Well-Rounded Mix 007 includes music from Billy Atwell, Austin and Elliott, Ave To, Marna Bales, Chris Elliot, The Freys, Dan Gonzalez, Gogol Bordello, Alicia Bay Laurel, Midnight Siren, Leah Siegel, Song Sparrow Research, and ThreeFifty Duo.

For all 13 artists on this show who wanted to share their music with you, consider buying their music, whether it's on a shiny piece of plastic or as a digital file. Buy a t-shirt or a hat or whatever schwag they're selling. Go see them live or make friends with them at myspace and last.fm or facebook or wherever. Tell a friend about them and share your good taste in music. Sign up to their email list or subscribe to an RSS feed. And tell them Well-Rounded Radio sent you if you can. The way the music business works is changing drastically by the day. Support the music you like and love and help change it.

The Fleshtones have been making amazing music for more than thirty years, starting off amid the CBGB's scene of the mid 70s in New York City (with the Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, The Ramones, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, Television, etc.) as a garage band with a lot of soul and ultimately merging into a sound they call Super Rock, which they describe as "a greasy ball of sonic and cultural influences ranging in feel from R&B, disco, and Lost In Space to garage, frat rock, and Mexican horror flicks."

The current band members include Ken Fox on bass and vocals, Bill Milhizer on drums and vocals, Keith Streng on guitar and vocals, and Peter Zaremba on lead vocals, harmonica, and organ. The Fleshtones were also recently immortalized in print with the release of Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band (Continuum Books, 2007) by Joe Bonomo. The book is a fascinating read about The Fleshtones, taking you from their origins in Whitestone, New York (just one town over from where I grew up in Flushing) in the 1970s through a variety of members who have played in the band, countless tours and albums, and up to the present. So, if you want the full story, do yourself a favor and read this book.

Well-Rounded Radio sixth Mix show includes Bedouin Soundclash, Ronnda Cadle, The Dave Kain Group, Ecce Hobo, Caitlin Frame, Gillian Grassie, Marco Mahler, Anne Roos, Post Oak Savannah, Eli "Paperboy" Reed, The Silver Lining, Devon Sproule, Stepladder, and The United Steelworkers of Montreal.

For all 15 artists on this show who wanted to share their music with you, consider buying their music, whether it's on a shiny piece of plastic or as a digital file. Buy a t-shirt or a hat or whatever schwag they're selling. Go see them live or make friends with them at myspace and last.fm or mog.com or wherever. Tell a friend about them and share your good taste in music. Sign up to their email list or subscribe to an RSS feed. And tell them Well-Rounded Radio sent you if you can. The way the music business works is changing drastically by the day. Support the music you like and love and help change it.

When I think back to when I first heard Pylon in 1979, I think it was on Hofstra University's radio station, WRHU, and my favorite DJ there, Jeff Foss, playing the songs Feast on My Heart and Volume amid any night's set list of amazing underground music when I was growing up in Queens, NY. I quickly bought Pylon's album Gyrate and later a 10" EP (with their earlier single and b-sides) and became a long-time fan of Pylon's music.

The band included then, and now, Randy Bewley on guitar, Vanessa Briscoe Hay's vocals, Curtis Crowe on drums, and Michael Lachowski on bass.

A brief history of Pylon? Four University of Georgia art students turned musicians inspired by the debut of music from groups such as The B-52's in Athens, Georgia formed their own band and recorded the single Cool/Dub (1979), albums Gyrate (1980) and Chomp (1983), all on DB Records, and a third album recorded during a reunion, Chain (1990) for Sky Records ...then disappeared again for too many years. A more detailed history can be found at wikipedia, the All Music Guide, and a terrific fan site.

I first learned about Jose Ayerve when I interviewed the members of Winterpills (check out their Well-Rounded Radio interview here), who Ayerve worked with on their two releases (Winterpills and The Light Divides), during our conversation early this year.

Spouse's frontman Ayerve sent me their latest release, Relocation Tactics, and, during a recent drive to Washington D.C. for The Future of Music Coalition summit, I listened to the album, once, twice...eventually probably about six or seven times on the drive down I-95 from Boston. Part of me kept wondering why Spouse was such a well-kept secret...and another part of me was wondering how soon I could get them on the show.

As a fan of her work in the band Tsunami, when I first heard that its singer/songwriter Jenny Toomey was working with a group of policy and legislative folks in Washington D.C. at The Future of Music Coalition, I was sort of surprised.

Toomey fronted the indie rock band Tsunami for much of the 1990s and a subsequent solo career that she continues today. She was also the co-founder of Simple Machines Records which, between 1990-1997 released over 70 records for acts including Tsunami, Scrawl, Ida, Grenadine, and Liquorice. Toomey's band mate and business partner was Kristin Thomson, who is also a Deputy and Education Director at The Future of Music Coalition. When you put it all together, though, it all makes perfect sense: Toomey is an independent musician who is still looking out for other working, independent musicians.

I first heard Eilen (rhymes with feelin') Jewell's music as she was playing at the Green River Music Festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts in the summer of 2006. Jewell was playing an outdoor stage, under a tent, with a myriad of activities going on around the festival property for both kids and adults, but the crowd was listening with rapt attention...not an easy thing to do when playing in such a setting!

Jewell's debut album, Boundary County, was self-released in 2005 and she subsequently signed to Signature Sounds, which released Letters from Sinners and Strangers in late June 2007. Jewell is playing live in the coming months at various points around the US.

My wife's family lives in and around Portland, Oregon, so at least a couple of times a year we head west from Boston to visit. The last few times I've picked up copies of the PDX Pop Now! two-disc CD compilations that have been released since 2004. Portland, or PDX as the city has been come to be known due to its airport's truncated ID, has long had a healthy music scene, but the compilations showed how diverse and robust the city's musical offerings had gotten. Each year PDX Pop Now! also puts on a 3-day, all-ages, free festival in Portland, usually in late July/early August (this year's dates are August 3-5, 2007) which brings together many of the artists featured on the CDs in a live setting that is nearly impossible to resist.

About two years ago I interviewed the members of The Stairs on the eve of their final shows as several members were following the calling of higher education. The Stairs released two albums, 2002's Miraculous Happens and 2005's On Sleep Lab, both of which were brilliant and ambitious pieces of rock and roll with instrumentation and a scale that defied its lo-fi production and budget. So, if you want the full story, make sure you listen to this, too.

Around the same time as The Stairs were ending, Ryan Walsh, vocalist + guitarist and one of the band's songwriters, and Eric Meyer, The Stairs' drummer, formed Hallelujah the Hills and started recruiting new members. The band now includes David Bentley (cello + guitar), Elio DeLuca (organ, Moog, guitar + sampler), Joseph Marrett (bass), and Brian Rutledge (trumpet + melodica). The outfit recorded their debut, Collective Psychosis Begone in 2006, signed to Misra Records early in 2007, and it was just released on June 5th. The band is heading on tour now, hitting a number of cities along the east coast and mid-west.

Sonicbids is an online service that offers musicians a way to submit their EPK, or electronic press kit, to a number of outlets for consideration. These including clubs and live venues, compilation CDs, festivals, songwriting contests, film, television, + commercial licensing, magazines, awards, college bookings, podcasts, Internet radio, and plenty of other opportunities, as they call them.

The company was founded in 2001 by Panos Panay and is still run by him today. And as of May 2007, Sonicbids is coming up on 100,000 members and 80,000 promoters from more than 100 countries around the globe.

Brooklyn, New York-based Antibalas is a collective of up to 17 musicians whose origins were in celebrating Afrobeat music, made famous by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in Nigeria in the 1970s. Since their origins in 1998, the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra has changed their name to simply Antibalas, but continues to infuse Afrobeat, funk, jazz, Latin, soul, and classical elements into their music to keep it growing in new directions.

I first heard Winterpillls when singer and keyboardist Flora Reed sent me a copy of their debut back in 2005. As a publicist for Signature Sounds Records, an independent label in Western Massachusettts with a focus on folk music, she had helped me with an earlier interview I did with Josh Ritter (check out the Well-Rounded Radio interview from when Hello Starling was first released) and Reed sent me a copy of this new band she was playing in.

Winterpills came across as a breath of fresh air: a delicate and perfect interplay of harmonies between a man and woman's voices, chiming, tasteful guitars, but all with an urgency in the lyrics and songwriting which made for an impressive debut.