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One of the more odd and interesting sites I've stumbled on lately (hat tip: blog.lab49.com) is not particularly beautiful in its layout or radical in its distribution. It is, however, both innovative in its content creation strategy and hosted by a funny, talented musician.

Songs to Wear Pants To is produced by Andrew, a web comedian who, during a bout of unemployment, decided to take on the challenge of making short songs with instructions dictated to him by his site's visitors...within any wild constraint.

If he's neglected to accept any challenge, of course, we would not know, since the form to submit is private. (He readily admits to trying to keep up with the requests but is currently "many thousands behind at the moment.") However, it's tough to imagine any of the visitor requests being more challenging or unusual than the ones he's accepted. He's been at it since 2004, I should note: long before the user-generated content revolution.

Some of the requests that Andrew has accepted over the past 3 years include what you'd expect:

1. REQUEST #0257:
If you could help me out with something that would be great. I really like this girl, but I don't know how to express it. If you could write a song about her with her beautiful light blue eyes, long brown hair, and great athletic body, that would be awesome.

Only Andrew's response to the plea for an original love song reflects his personal disturbance at the requestor's lack of any detail about the object of his desire outside of her physical attributes:
SONG #0257: THIS GIRL

Many of the other requests are more exotic:

2. REQUEST: #0286
A ska song, about death metal.
SONG #0286 DEATH METAL

3. REQUEST #0007:
dear songmaker: please make an a capella chant-type song about people who photocopy their body parts (you may wish to focus on the photocopying of the buttocks), with at least 14 layers of your voice.
SONG #0007 WE PHOTOCOPY OUR BODY PARTS


4. REQUEST #0023:
be bjork.
SONG #0023: I AM BJORK

5. REQUEST #0033:
1) A swing song about watching sitcoms.
2) A song in beatbox-style about the death of beta format.
3) A mash-up of the previous two songs. :D
SONG #0033: THE TV TRILOGY

6. REQUEST #0100:
please use a geek voice and rap about megabytes and gigabytes
SONG #0100: MEGABYTES & GIGABYTES FREESTYLE

And, my personal favorite,

7. REQUEST #0052:
Please compose and record a song extolling the virtues of your Web site in which the lengths of the words can also be used as a mnemonic for at least the first 50 digits of pi. In other words, the first word has three letters, the second word one letter, the third word four letters, and so on.
SONG #0052: I AM THE FIRST FIFTY DIGITS OF PI

Yes, more than any social anthropologist, the web has revealed what a wild world it is.

Although, if you don't believe me that Andrew is talented (in addition to being goofy), I recommend you take a listen. The challenges may be bizarre but the musical r