Time for another Monday Music Medley with your boy MiamiBuckeye.

First up we have an incandescent instrumental by one of my favorite American purveyors of folk metal, Agalloch. In this song, the aptly named "Odal," which, while without any one subject, does feel as if it's lauding something, as an ode does, the guitars and bass play off one another and the atmospherics to create a soundspace that's at once relaxing and vaguely tinged by dread, but more than anything beautiful. Give it a listen, close your eyes, imagine yourself in a desolate, windswept forest that seems a monument to the power of death and the winter, but holds in its withered trees the promise of the spring to come. If you get to the arpeggio at 4:20 in and your spine isn't shivering, then you're listening wrong.

I wasn't alive yet in 1979. In fact, I don't think my parents had even met by that point. The 1979 holds no sentimental value to me whatsoever except in one respect: it is the title of arguably the best Smashing Pumpkins song ever. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans might be more sweetly sad and grand, and Tonight, Tonight might boast a more epic sound, but "1979" distills everything that's good about alternative rock.

So full disclosure on this next one. I only ever listened to it in the first place because the rapper's name was the same (minus one letter) as my last name. But I found something indelible in Duckwrth's strange, disjointed, toned down rap with its equally disjointed and unusual music video. This is a song about mortality and self-image. This is "The Ending" by Duckwrth.

Last up is a song that first came to my attention in an episode of the underrated animated sitcom King of the Hill. In that episode, Hank together with his alley friends and Connie (who plays a mean fiddle) get together to form a bluegrass band. Their signature song is "Blue Moon of Kentucky," which was first made famous by bluegrass musician Bill Monroe. Here's the Bill Monroe version.