Dory Previn

One of the most enigmatic figures in rock history, Scott Walker was known as Scotty Engel when he cut obscure flop records in the late '50s and early '60s in the teen idol vein. He then hooked up with John Maus and Gary Leeds to form the Walker Brothers. They weren't named Walker, they weren't brothers, and they weren't English, but they nevertheless became a part of the British Invasion after moving to the U.K. in 1965. They enjoyed a couple of years of massive success there (and a couple of hits in the U.S.) in a Righteous Brothers vein. As their full-throated lead singer and principal songwriter, Walker was the dominant artistic force in the group, who split in 1967. While remaining virtually unknown in his homeland, Walker launched a hugely successful solo career in Britain with a unique blend of orchestrated, almost MOR arrangements with idiosyncratic and morose lyrics. At the height of psychedelia, Walker openly looked to crooners like Sinatra, Jack Jones, and Tony Bennett for inspiration, and to Jacques Brel for much of his material. None of those balladeers, however, would have sung about the oddball subjects – prostitutes, transvestites, suicidal brooders, plagues, and Joseph Stalin – that populated Walker's songs.

These albums by maestro Faith are very different and sound great on cd.Held Over is just instrumental and Leaving On A Jet Plane is all Vocal with Faith's mixed chrous.Faith used a light string contingment on Held Over and even lighter on Leaving On A Jet Plane.These albums are even more unique for another reason.They contain very different versions of the same songs.
Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head is instrumental on Held Over and done vocalley on Leaving On A Jet Plane.Easy Rider is instrumental on Raindrops but vocal on Leaving.Also Faith's version of Leaving On A Jet Plane is beautiful and got a lot of play on beautiful music stations in the 70's.I highley recommend this CD .- Amazon -

Before lockdown halted their tour in early 2020, singer Stuart Staples was already nurturing seeds for a different kind of Tindersticks album. If 2019’s No Treasure but Hope saw these mavens of intimate, expansive mood song rediscovering themselves as a unit, the follow-up reconfigures that unit so that everything familiar about Tindersticks sounds fresh again. Released through City Slang on February 19th, Distractions is an album of subtle realignments and connections from a restless, intuitive band: rich in texture and atmosphere, it lives between its open spaces and filigree details, always finding new ways to connect with a song.

It is easier to define Dionne Warwick by what she isn't rather than what she is. Although she grew up singing in church, she is not a gospel singer. Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan are clear influences, but she is not a jazz singer. R&B is also part of her background, but she is not really a soul singer, either, at least not in the sense that Aretha Franklin is…

Tindersticks are a band whose music is defined by a mood as much as a style, and if anyone is looking for proof to that theory, 2021's Distractions will do nicely. The lush, expansively orchestrated sound of 2019's No Treasure but Hope was a stellar example of prime Tindersticks, a sprawling canvas composed from an infinity of small details. Distractions, on the other hand, is nearly as powerful while sounding atypically spare, created from what for this group is the bare minimum of elements but still achieving the cool, majestic tone of their most famous work. Tindersticks leader Stuart Staples has said Distractions isn't a lockdown album, but that the isolation imposed on its production by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 reinforced a creative choice that was already in place, and this music clearly took creative advantage of the limits that outside circumstances imposed on the musicians.