…and less than half of them are about telephones!

1. “The Party Line,” Belle & Sebastian. Brand new. First single from the Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance album, due in January.

“Teen Line,”The Shivvers. Overlooked power pop classic from late-1970s Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in recent years known only to those who’d heard it on the Hyped2Death compilation named after it. The song, and a lost album’s worth of other Shivvers tunes, were recently remixed and rereleased on vinyl by Sing Sing Records. Some local Milwaukee press coverage of the band’s comeback is here.

2. “88 lines for 44 Women,” The Nails. For those of us who didn’t think of punk as just a snarl-and-violence thing, this was a fast and loose memoir that took full advantage of the new form:

Sarah was a modern dancer
lean pristine transparency
Janet wrote bad poetry
in a crazy kind of urgency
Tanya Turkish liked to fuck
while wearing leather biker boots
Brenda’s strange obsession
was for certain vegetables and fruit

3. “Telephone Line,” Electric Light Orchestra. “OK, so no one’s answering…”

4. “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke. The infectious beat is Marvin Gaye’s and the lyrics have been dubbed “rapey” by Huffington Post, jezebel.com, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal and others. But this execrable hit did inspire Weird Al Yankovic’s good-grammar anthem “Word Crimes.”

5. “Laughter Lines,” Bastille. This boy band only formed four years ago, but they make elaborate videos like they’re Duran Duran in the ‘80s.

“I’ll see you in the future when we’re older

and we are full of stories to be told. 

Cross my heart and hope to die,

I’ll see you with your laughter lines.” 

6. “White Lines,” Grandmaster Flash.

7. “Between the Lines,” Janis Ian.

8. “Days of Lines and Noses,” proposed Joe Walsh album title.

10. “An Apology For Five Songs About Power Lines,” The World Without Parking Lots.