Deluxe extended version of the 1974 album from Michael Chapman featuring 6 bonus tracks and sleeve notes…
The theme song 'You're Dead' to the FX show What We Do in the Shadows has fostered a new appreciation for the singular talent that was Norma Tanega. And it's high time, too…Norma was discovered while singing to Catskill summer campers by producer Herb Bernstein, who brought her to Four Seasons songwriter Bob Crewe. Crewe signed her to his New Voice label, and success was instantaneous: the title song to Walkin' My Cat Named Dog went to #22 on the charts. But, despite the album's folk-pop trappings, Norma Tanega was not an artist destined to stay at the top of the charts for long; her voice was unconventional, and her songs were too idiosyncratic, not sticking to typical song structure or even meter (for example, 'No Stranger Am I' is set to a 5/4 time signature).
Fire in the Blood: The Definitive Collection, a massive career-spanning box set featuring the work of Welsh singer and songwriter Shakin’ Stevens. The 19 CD box set features all of Shaky’s albums as a solo artist, from his first signing and album on Track Records, to his latest studio album, Echoes Of Our Times and it also comes with four CDs of rarities. Shaky was a chart sensation in the UK in the 1980s, in fact, he was the biggest selling singles artist of that decade. Stevens enjoyed 15 British top ten hits in the 1980s and four UK number ones. In total, this set contains 266 tracks and notable inclusions are a live concert recorded at the Paris Theatre, London for BBC Radio 1 in 1980 and the four rarities discs are packed with B-sides, 12-inch mixes, two previously unreleased tracks and more.
For singer/songwriter Becca Stevens, making music is a charmed form of service—a means of mining her own experience for insight into the beautiful complexity of being alive, in the hopes of providing others with understanding and solace and a renewed sense of strength. But in the early days of 2023, the North Carolina-bred artist felt an overwhelming need to process two monumental changes in her life (the death of her mother and the start of her own journey into motherhood), and soon sought the comfort and catharsis of pure self-expression. By the time she emerged from that period of unfettered creativity, Stevens had completed her new album Maple to Paper: an illuminating glimpse into her most private moments of grief and transcendence, rendered with both stunning clarity and heartfelt devotion to music’s alchemical powers.