Remember my Name

David Crosby's debut solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name is a one-shot wonder of dreamy but ominous California ambience. The songs range from brief snapshots of inspiration (the angelic chorale-vocal showcase on "Orleans" and the a cappella closer, "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here") to the full-blown, rambling western epic "Cowboy Movie," and there are absolutely no false notes struck or missteps taken…

Essential: a masterpiece of country-rock music
Like a super-stoned campfire jam with an A-list of Cali hippie-rockers – including Joni Mitchell and most of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and CSNY – this hazy solo project by the altered-consciousness overachiever sounds like it was pretty much made up on the spot.

David Crosby's debut solo album was the second release in a trilogy of albums (the others being Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire and Mickey Hart's Rolling Thunder) involving the indefinite aggregation of Bay Area friends and musical peers that informally christened itself the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. Everyone from the members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane to Crosby's mates in CSNY, Neil Young and Graham Nash, dropped by the studio to make significant contributions to the proceedings. (Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzman, primarily, act as the ad hoc studio band, with other notables adding bits of flavor to other individual tracks.) Crosby, however, is the obvious captain of this ship.

Singer-songwriter David Crosby's solo debut, If I Could Only Remember My Name, was dismissed by critics when it came out in 1971. Over the years, however, appreciation has grown for the album's adventurous aesthetic, stacked harmonies and haunting lyrics about loss and confusion. Billed as Crosby's solo debut, the album was anything but a one-man project.

A legendary act from Luxembourg, which played along the lines of Marillion, albeit with a more bombastic and symphonic sound. They were found in 1988 in Dudelange and moved throughout their career around original members Patrick Kiefer (vocals), Alex Rukavina (keyboards) and Chris Sonntag (drums). 1993 sees the debut of the band ''Zodiac'' and two years later the fantastic follow-up ''The Secret Garden'' is published. Shortly after they secured a contract with Musea's branch label Angular Records and they celebrated their 10th anniversary with a third release, ''The Other Side''. Entering the millenium the band was put on ice due to family commitments of the members, but in 2006 they returned with their fourth album ''4'', released under the support of Musea…

As a two-CD overview of the career of Peter Bardens, Write My Name in the Dust: Anthology manages to fit in a lot of material and display his work in different contexts, but also suffers from some problems that might prevent it from being wholly satisfying to some fans of his music. Despite the 40-year time span of the title, it's not a chronologically balanced selection by any means; 23 of the 29 tracks predate 1972, only three postdate the mid-'70s, and those three are all from his 2002 album The Art of Levitation. Too, there are just three cuts from Camel, which to art rock listeners might be the most familiar of the groups in which Bardens played.