Five Times August

Okay, Houston, are we just the last to know? Dallas native Brad Skistimas, a.k.a. Five Times August (he was born on August 5 and assumed no one could spell or remember Skistimas), seems to be the hottest unsigned commodity in pop music. He's had songs on MTV's Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, Lifetime's Monarch Cove and Oxygen Channel's Bad Girls Club. His MySpace site reports that his player has been hit over five million times. Meanwhile, when he's not on the Internet answering fan mail or at the post office sending out the day's orders for his latest album, Fry Street — which has already sold a respectable 11,000 copies — Skistimas is on the road to college towns all across the Midwest and California. (The guy must live in airplanes, as on one stretch of his current tour, he's in Fort Wayne, Indiana, one night and Laramie, Wyoming, the next.) While the music reminds me that I've already lived through Counting Crows once in my lifetime, there's no denying this is the stuff MTV survives on. How much longer Skistimas will be playing 50-seat venues like Mojo Risin' remains to be seen.