Mail Order Magic

This is the Magic Mile is a three-CD compilation album by Australian rock guitarist Ed Kuepper, released in 2005. The album is a 49-track retrospective of his output from 1991 to 2000. While Smile … Pacific (2000) and Character Assassination (1994) are heavily represented—with 15 tracks drawn from the two albums—the collection also includes a 1994 single ("If I Had a Ticket"), several cuts from limited-release mail-order albums and two tracks from his side project The Aints. The album includes a song, "Camooweal", that had originally been recorded for the Slim Dusty tribute album Not So Dusty (1998), which had also featured Midnight Oil, Mental as Anything and Cold Chisel's Don Walker. Other covers included AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" and Eric Burdon's "When I Was Young".

Roger Chapman is best known for his barbed-wire voice, used to front British '70s rock acts Family and Streetwalkers. He began a long-awaited solo career in 1978 that led to over a dozen full-length releases. Never heard of them? It's not surprising: album-wise, he camped out in Germany for 20 years. His first album and tour got high praise in his British homeland, but critics cut into him soon after. When the hassle-free German market beckoned, Chapman began to focus his subsequent work there, where he had become a musical hero, "the working-class artist." Chapman split with his longtime writing partner, Charlie Whitney, after the breakup of Streetwalkers in 1977.

Emerging as a great pop vocal stylist in 1954, Nat King Cole enjoyed a string of hit singles and albums thereon, but Unforgettable is perhaps the singer at his early peak. With romance as the watchword, Cole slides through some of his most familiar ballads, include the title selection, "Portrait of Jennie," "Mona Lisa," and "I Love You (For Sentimental Reasons)." There are quite a few lesser known, but attractive songs, plus a small handful of standards ("What'll I Do?" is a keeper) that round out this interesting collection. The very artistic, near surreal three-dimensional white, charcoal black, and royal blue-hued front cover may be the best part of this reissue, as it reflects a time period defined by its simplicity and yet its increasingly technological, superimposed modernity.

It speaks well for the continued viability of their catalog (probably second only to Bob Dylan's among '60s folk artists) that this is only the sixth compilation ever done on Peter, Paul & Mary's music in four decades of musical activity - and since one of the others was a Readers' Digest mail-order release and two of the others were done for special markets outside of the United States, that low number is downright astonishing. This release effectively supplants the perennially popular Ten Years Together: The Best of Peter, Paul & Mary, from 1970, and also outdoes the 2003 WEA International Very Best Of, with more songs drawn from a much wider chunk of their history as well. The material at hand covers not only most of the key singles and a handful of important album tracks by the trio from the 1960s, but also acknowledges their less widely heard solo material from the 1970s…

Classic 1982 Chicago studio session also featuring Buddy Guy - plus stunning live tracks and previously unreleased three track studio session.