Second OnHold Podcast Out

As far as we can tell the second installment of the city's super cool OnHold program went into rotation over the weekend. No, we haven't spent the last two days on hold with city hall, but it appeared in our RSS sometime over the weekend so we're assuming it's new. You remember OnHold, right? It's a playlist composed of various Seattle-based musicians that you hear if you're on hold with the city or if you're a big geek and you download the thing and put it on your ipod like Seattlest. Then if you buy music from the playlist a portion of the proceeds goes to the city Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs.

There are a few changes since the first installment. Unfortunately, there's no Greg Nickels on the new one. On the first release he popped in every once in a while to tell you about the the program like, "Hi, I'm Greg Nickels and you're on hold." We wanted to do a Mayor Nickels mix of one or several of the songs on the first podcast and insert a few more soundbites from him but we never got around to it. This time there's an unnamed voice introducing each track and giving a tiny bio on the artists. It's much better. The songs seem a little shorter and there may not be as many of them, but we have to say that they've come a lot closer to delivering what the OnHold program promised to be in the first place.

We haven't gotten through the whole thing yet, but early highlights are the Seattle Men's Chorus doing "We Shall Overcome," and Central Services (someone from the Math and Science Club) singing "Song 89." We're looking forward to Jim Page's rousing rendition of the standard, "Ice Skating on the Fremont Bridge," and "Press Any Key to Continue," from Michael Powers.

Here's a link to the MP3 and here's the XML feed.