Son OF Sherman

After his debut with 1970's Down to Earth, Jimmy Buffett released an album a year from 1973 to 1977, culminating with his commercial and artistic breakthrough, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, which apotheosized his beach-bum persona in its hit single "Margaritaville." A year later, he's back with his seventh album, Son of a Son of a Sailor, but things have changed. Now, Buffett has a high-profile manager in Irving Azoff (who is dressed like Napoleon in the high-fashion photo spread across the gatefold of the LP), and as his smiling, well-upholstered image on the cover shows, he's not a beach bum anymore; now he looks like the happy owner of a yacht. Accordingly, he isn't writing songs like "Margaritaville" anymore, either…

In terms of the scale of his compositions, John Adams' career is somewhat anomalous for a contemporary composer. While the usual pattern tends to be for a composer to begin a career writing smaller pieces (which have a far likelier chance of being performed) and then expanding to larger forms as his or her reputation grows, Adams (with very few exceptions) was writing large-scale operas and orchestral and choral works starting in the early '80s and didn't begin devoting himself to chamber music with any regularity until the mid-'90s.

Emboldened by a huge hit and hanging with Lennon and Ringo, Harry Nilsson was ready to let it all go when it came time to record a follow-up to Nilsson Schmilsson. The very title of Son of Schmilsson implies that it's a de facto sequel to its smash predecessor but, as always with Nilsson, don't take everything at face value…