So, about a year ago, I made a small OP character soundtrack for an eljay community that has since been deleted (a couple notes: 1) at the time, I was working my way through Alabasta--I think I was nearly finished with it, actually; around chapter 200 or so, 2) I was only reading the manga, not watching the anime, and 3) I... am almost certain that picture of Ace is fanart, but I guess that's kind of irrelevant at this point). It's been kind of a dream of mine since then to make a larger, more expanded version, encompassing more characters (how could I have left out Smoker and Tashigi? I don't understand you, brain), but it's something I've just never gone around to doing. In a year. So I'm kind of a slacker! I think I tried making a short list of all the characters I wanted to include over the summer, but of course, as I've said, three crashed hard drives in as many months is just not very conducive to, um, ANYTHING.

Since I recently quit school for the semester, I have a little more free time on my hands, and I finally managed to make a full-ish list, and I started going through iTunes one artist at a time. But, uhhh... the list is over 150 characters long (I'll probably cut a lot of them before long), and I have almost 500 artists and 5,000 songs. My eyes kind of started to glaze over after about five minutes.

Err... in conclusion! I am imploring your help. Since the only people who would read this are OP fans, I figure you guys probably have good ideas. My only rule in making soundtracks is that I never use the same artist twice (I'm sorry I'm so anal), which means any artists I've already used are off limits (unless someone can convince me to change any of the songs I've already chosen, but I'm pretty attached to it).

And if you have any fellow OP fan friends who have any suggestions, I'm open to them as well. I'm not choosy ;D (Please. Did you notice the use of Mandy Moore? Obviously I have already established myself as not having very high standards.)

And if anybody can convince me NOT to use Man Machine by Robbie Williams for Franky, please, I'd like to hear it XD

LAY IT ON ME.

-- Oh. Ha. I lied. I have TWO rules (I knew I was forgetting one). The other one is that female characters get songs with female vocalists, male characters get songs with male vocalists. This is because I don't go strictly by lyrics (that would be boring, and also hard), but also by music, sound, and overall impression of the song. For the record, Bon Clay still gets a male vocalist song XD