Dido Acoustic)

After the intoxicating heat of Mediterraneo, released in 2013, Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L'Arpeggiata now head to the cooler climes of England with Music for a While, an album based on the haunting, graceful and sometimes deeply moving music of Henry Purcell.

Born in 1975, Scottish singer/songwriter KT Tunstall – not short for anything, the KT is just an alternate spelling of Katie – comes from the quaint university town of St. Andrews. Due in part to being adopted at birth, her imagination and creative side flourished from early on as she thought about how her life could have gone in any given direction. As she was growing up, her physicist father would take Tunstall and her brothers into the St. Andrews observatory to look at the sky, thus fueling her youthful love for space and sci-fi. It wasn't until discovering hair metal through a brother that music really started to become important to her, and when it did, her affection for spacy things was reflected in her favorite album, David Bowie's Hunky Dory.

Unlike her indie-disco counterparts CSS, the Gossip and Ting Tings, New Zealand one-woman show Ladyhawke has yet to break through to the mainstream, despite possessing a much more polished sound that seems tailor-made for the upper reaches of the charts. Her self-titled debut album, co-written with the likes of Pascal Gabriel (Dido) and Hannah Robinson (Girls Aloud) suggests that commercial success will surely only be a matter of time.

Four albums in 15 years is not exactly prolific when it comes to making records. But Annie Lennox has never been one to rush things, and her recorded output as a solo artist in life after the Eurythmics has been stellar. The last time she issued a recording in 2003 with Bare, a collection of deeply committed emotional songs that set a new standard for her artistically, though they were written in the turmoil following her second divorce. Perhaps the reason she hasn't had the time to record is her activism. She's involved herself in causes that range from her primary concern, raising awareness about AIDS/HIV (and she refers to this in the album's notes), to the environment and poverty. But Songs of Mass Destruction isn't a political album by any means, unless the personal is – and often it is. This is another album of love songs; dark love songs. These are breakup ballads, statuesque embers of pain and rage that have simmered down to the traces of that dull ache of emptiness that always exists in the aftermath of something profound.

Even before the first KuschelRock album, Kuschelrock was named as a weekly nightly music program for HR3 radio station (HR3 broadcasts from Frankfurt, Germany), the author and host of this project was Thomas Koschwitz, who is considered to be the co-author of a number of albums in Kazle … After Sony Music patented the right to release a series of albums called "KuschelRock", the HR3 radio station can no longer air this night music show … And now Sony Music regularly releases every year on the album …