Composer/keyboardist Mychael Danna released a handful of ambient neo-classical albums early in his career, including 1991's Sirens, while embarking on what would become a long, award-winning career in film and TV scoring. His varied, mostly orchestral work in the medium spans animated family films (Disney Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur), award-winning dramas (Moneyball), indie comedies (Little Miss Sunshine), and long-running partnerships with directors Ang Lee and Atom Egoyan. Also an Emmy and Golden Globe winner, Danna won an Academy Award in 2013 for his score to Ang Lee’s Life of Pi.
The Top 100 '60s Rock Albums represent the moment when popular music came of age. In the earliest part of the decade, bands were still regularly referencing earlier sounds and themes. By the middle, something powerful and distinct was happening, which is why the latter part of the '60s weighs so heavily on our list. A number of bands evolved alongside fast-emerging trends of blues rock, folk rock, psychedelia and hard rock, adding new complexities to the music even as the songs themselves became more topical. If there's a thread running through the Top 100 '60s Rock Albums and this period of intense change, it has to do with the forward-thinking artists who managed to echo and, in some cases, advance the zeitgeist. Along the way, legends were made.
There have been previous attempts to marshal a lot of British psychedelia into one compilation, but Real Life Permanent Dreams is a little different from those. This four-CD, 99-song box set isn't a best-of, but more like an attempt to assemble a very wide (though still representative) cross section of material, most of it pretty obscure to the average listener. For the most part, it succeeds in delivering a high-quality anthology that manages to offer a lot to both the collector and the less intense psychedelic fan, though it's by no means the cream of British psychedelia.