Tommy James has racked up a whopping 17 Top 40 hits, including two No. 1s, and sold more than 100 million records. And his music has been covered by everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Dolly Parton to Lene Lovich, Tiffany, Billy Idol, and Joan Jett. Yet you won’t find an entry for James and the […]
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When I met with Steve Van Zandt (aka Little Steven) in 2019, I asked him whether the brand of rock and soul that he’d created with Southside Johnny was the music that was closest to his heart. He said it was, adding, “I returned to that this past two years, and I’m gonna stick with […]
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Wilco’s terrific Summerteeth—the group’s third album, which first appeared in 1999—expands to more than four times its original length in a recently issued deluxe edition. The clamshell-boxed set couples a remaster of the adventurous original record to a wealth of previously unreleased material, including two dozen demos and outtakes and a 26-song contemporaneous Boulder, Colorado, […]
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Folk/pop singer/songwriter Cat Stevens famously walked away from the music business in 1978, but that wasn’t his first career turning point. (Nor was it his last; he has returned to making records in recent years.) The British artist—born Steven Georgiou and known as Yusuf Islam since his conversion to the Muslim faith—achieved some […]
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In the late 1960s, John Prine was a Chicago mailman who wrote and played songs as a hobby. Then, in the summer of 1970, at age 23, he started performing in local clubs. Just three months later, he was attracting big crowds, at least one of which included Roger Ebert, who decided to take […]
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You’ll find essential tracks on each of the six albums in Dire Straits’ recently issued clamshell-boxed set, The Studio Albums 1978–1991, which includes the British rock group’s eponymous 1978 debut plus Communique(1979), Making Movies (1980), Love Over Gold (1982), Brothers in Arms (1985), and On Every Street (1991). The CDs are packaged in mini replicas […]
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A new edition of Sign O’ the Times, Prince’s brilliant and remarkably eclectic 1987 double album, easily earns its “super deluxe” billing with a long list of bonus goodies. Delivered in an LP-sized slipcase, the set includes an excellent remaster of the original album on two discs, plus six additional CDs: one with remastered single […]
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A remarkable new box set lets you listen in as Joan Anderson, an obscure folksinger from Western Canada, turns into the internationally beloved artist known as Joni Mitchell. Called Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963–1967), the five-disc collection consists entirely of live performances that (bootlegs aside) have not previously seen the light […]
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On most of the albums in his large catalog, Bruce Springsteen limns fictional characters—everyone from the kids trying to escape their small-town lives in “Thunder Road” to the downtrodden folks in the John Steinbeck–inspired “Ghost of Tom Joad.” Though last year’s Western Stars also seems to have issued mostly from the Boss’s imagination, he has […]
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Like the Bee Gees and a handful of other bands, Fleetwood Mac were lucky enough to have enjoyed more than one life. In their first incarnation, with guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer, they were a British blues rock outfit. (For the best of this period, don’t miss the superlative six-disc The Complete Blue […]
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