After spending most of this decade in retirement, '80s college radio icon Scott Miller has finally returned from his self-imposed exile with a new Loud Family album recorded as a collaboration with fellow Californian power pop songwriter Anton Barbeau.

The record kicks off with a relatively straight cover of the Rolling Stones' classic "Rocks Off," and then settles into the delicately melodic "Song About "Rocks Off"," a clever, self-aware track. It's typical of an artist whose best instincts have always been informed by a combination of inspired song craft and thoughtful postmodernism.

After indulging himself with a favorite song from his teenage years, Miller ruminates on his history with the song, especially his strange, vicarious relationship with its lyrics as a young man, and the way rock lyrics can become sacred texts to teenagers.

Parisian electronica producer Space Cowboy splits the difference between covering a song and writing about it by integrating the Waitresses' classic hit "I Know What Boys Like" into his own "I Know What Girls Like," and then spinning it off into a completely new direction, both musically and lyrically.

Though the vocal hook apes the cool, above-it-all delivery of the Waitresses, Space Cowboy sidesteps the familiar bop of their hit in favor of a more modern, super dynamic track with a giddy rush of his own design. The track is brilliantly composed, but the real action is in the vocals. As the male and female singers repeatedly declare that they know what the other gender wants, they seem indifferent to everything other than making themselves sexually desirable. It's a clever deconstruction of the sentiment of the Waitresses' original song, as well as that of the nightclub meat market.

On this selection from the PDX Pop Now 2006 compilation, Portland natives Rocketship serve up a charming, offbeat tune that they hesitantly title "Our New Track,'"' as though they're wary of taking full credit for the song and insist on putting their authorship in question with the scare quotes. It's not hard to understand why they might feel that way - though the song includes no samples, it does seem to interpolate several recognizable tunes, including the theme from Super Mario Brothers and "Under The Sea" from the Little Mermaid soundtrack. Don't let that put you off, though. Even with its oddball melodic appropriations and strange twists, the track has a unique flavor that sets Rocketship apart from their peers in the Pacific Northwest, or elsewhere.