The Green Future

Rhino's 1993 collection The Very Best of Wilson Pickett remains the best single-disc anthology of the fiery soul singer's work, choosing 16 of his best tracks for Atlantic and presenting them in excellent remastered sound quality. Pickett never departed all that much from the rough, swaggering vocals that first made his name, but he was utterly electrifying within that style, setting the standard for Southern soul singers behind Otis Redding. All of Pickett's early signature hits – "In the Midnight Hour," "634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)," "Land of 1,000 Dances," "Mustang Sally," and "Funky Broadway" – lead off the disc in quick succession, capturing the emergence of Southern soul as a viable commercial style. But Pickett is just as charismatic on the rest of the material, nearly all of which made the R&B Top Ten and went under appreciated on the pop charts – he was just too much for white audiences to handle. Pickett did his best to shake up his formula – he cut a near-psychedelic soul tune, "Engine No. 9," with future Philly soul architects Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff; he helped bring Bobby Womack back into the music business by covering his "I'm in Love" and "I'm a Midnight Mover"; and he made some unpredictable cover choices in the Beatles' "Hey Jude," the Archies' bubblegum tune "Sugar Sugar," and Free's "Fire and Water."

Originally released in 1986 as the natural successor to “The Tower”.The focus, although framed by 80s reality, was set on a truly desolate, Dystopian future with a conclusion so bleak in the “Our Lady “ trilogy, that the band penned “ The Guardians of Eden” for the sake of their own sanity. Ironically, the irreverent pop song “ Curious Guy” emerged from the same sessions. Remastered in 2020 by Ray Steeg and Peter Van Vliet.

The initial inspiration for this project came to me while I was writing a monograph on Schönberg’s “Verklärte Nacht”, Il labirinto e l’intrico dei viottoli [The Labyrinth and the Tangle of Pathways]. Schönberg, like Mahler, was attuned to the relationship between music and venues for music, and in my research, I discovered that Mahler was particularly concerned with the chamber-music aspect of his own Lieder from the Wunderhorn collection. He had even conducted some of them in what was then known as the Small Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein (now Brahms Hall), a space only suitable for a chamber orchestra—too small for the ensemble required for some of these Lieder. I consequently wondered about the kind of adaptation Mahler had made for that performance, while I was already considering undertaking a similar operation myself.