Apples in Stereo -- "Signal in the Sky (Let's Go)" (2000)

Hey girls, hey girls, come out and play now!

Or do you have to hurry off to save the day now?

There may be people out there who get more use out of the Washington, DC public library than I do.  But I haven't met them yet.

Not only do I get all the books I read at the DC library, I also get most of my music there.

Mies van der Rohe designed the
main Washington, DC library

As of today, I have 18,367 songs in my iTunes account.  Some of those were downloaded from my CDs, and some were downloaded from the artists' websites.  A handful were purchased from the iTunes store.

But the overwhelming majority -- certainly at least 90%, and probably more like 95% -- came from library-owned CDs.

The CD pickings are starting to get a bit slim, but I recently discovered another source of free music from the library: Freegal.

Freegal is a downloadable music service sold to libraries by a company called Library Ideas LLC.  It allows library patrons to download up to three songs per week from the Sony Music catalog -- which includes over a million different songs -- for free.

I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there's a lot of great music that you can't get from Freegal.  For examples, there are no Beatles songs.  (There are tons of Beatles covers, and a lot of instrumental tracks of Beatles songs if you're into karaoke.)  And there aren't any songs by the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin.

But I've found plenty of music that I want and can't get for free any other way.  

I just discovered that the Montgomery County, MD public library also has Freegal.  I live in Montgomery County and have a library card there, too, so I can get six free songs a week.

(Actually, I can get nine free songs each week because my son registered for a Montgomery County library card in his name and gave it to me so I could check out more items.)

The only Apples in Stereo CD that either library has is New Magnetic Wonder -- the sixth of the group's seven studio studio albums -- which was released in 2007.  

But Freegal has the band's first five studio albums, plus their two most recent EPs, plus two of their compilation albums, plus some miscellaneous releases.  That's a total of just over 100 Apples in Stereo songs . . . every one of them  absolutely free.  With three Freegal accounts, I'll have everyone of them within a few months.

What a country!

"Signal in the Sky (Let's Go)" is from the 2000 Powerpuff Girls soundtrack album, Heroes & Villains, which topped the Billboard children's music chart for six weeks.  It also appears on the group's 2009 compilation album, #1 Hits Explosion.    

The Powerpuff Girls was an animated TV series that ran on the Cartoon Network from 1998 through 2005.  My twin daughters (who were born in 1986) were a little too old to be fans of the Powerpuff Girls, who were just about the cutest little superheroes you've ever seen.  But my younger son (born in 1994) loved them, and so did I.

Here's the introduction to The Powerpuff Girls:

Here's "Signal in the Sky (Let's Go)," which is a fabulous three-minute pop song:

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: