"I'm not thinking right today"

I've been feeling a little sprightly and loopy lately, so the following two songs have fitted my mood perfectly.

Santa Maria is the solo project of Maria Eriksson from The Concretes. While I like The Concretes, I enjoy Santa Maria infinitely more. It's immediately accessible, yet doesn't pale with repeated listening. On the contrary, I've found each song to be more complex that it initially sounded. Cuckoo finds Eriksson ably assisted by (amongst others) Markus Krunegård and Lars Skoglund of Laakso. This is a bouncy, sing-a-long-able and utterly wonderful song about mooning around. Brilliant!

Santa Maria - Cuckoo mp3 (available for 7 days)

The other song is a cover of a Belle and Sebastian song by Bille the Vision and the Dancers (who have a new album out on June 4th) - I'm A Cuckoo - and a lovely job they made of it too! It was on a Belle and Sebastian tribute album entitled A Century of Covers, which can be downloaded from Kirsten's Postcard.

Billie the Vision and the Dancers - I'm A Cuckoo mp3 (available for 7 days)

Here's the Santa Maria website and here's the Billie the Vision website, where you can find information about where to buy music by these lovely Swedes.

I'm off to find more songs about cuckoos to usurp my current playlist.