Tribute For The Goddess

X: The Godless Void and Other Stories appeared at a timely point in …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's career. It arrived six years after the release of 2014's IX, during which time Conrad Keely returned from Cambodia to the band's home base of Austin, Texas, and also coincided with their 25th anniversary. It makes sense, then, that their tenth album finds them taking stock. As …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead explore how people become more themselves over time while everything else changes, they deliver their most emotionally direct music in quite a while. Their need to follow their hearts – even if they get a little broken along the way – has dominated their music since Source Tags & Codes, and the tension between cathartic freedom and poignancy is as powerful on X: The Godless Void and Other Stories as it was on that landmark album.

Like Greatest Hits of the Kali Yuga, The Best of Krishna Das samples the singer's earlier devotional works, here drawing upon his albums One Track Heart, Pilgrim Heart, Breath of the Heart, Live on Earth, and Door of Faith. A devotee of Maharaj Ji Neem Karoli Baba, Krishna Das has spent much of his adult life making good on his vow to use his singing voice to alleviate suffering in the world. Krishna Das is that most wonderful blend of Eastern and Western cultures; originally a resident of Long Island, N.Y., he studied in northern India as a young man and has since spent decades reinterpreting the sacred music of that land in ways that are pleasant and often surprising. As a man who sounds at times like Waylon Jennings and who is obviously enamored of the "lila" or divine playfulness, Krishna Das seems to enjoy deliberately toying with the unusual and even humorous aspects of the East/West dichotomy, as when on the album One Track Heart he sang a "Krishna Waltz" that sounded more than a little like the old cowboy tune "Get Along Little Dogies." As an encapsulation of his life's work, this Krishna Das best-of collection is entirely devoted to Sri Neem Karoli Baba and through him to the One Deity with a thousand names and as many aspects as there are atoms in the universe.

SoulMusic Records is exceptionally pleased to present the first-ever box set of the music of the late Phyllis Hyman, who created a wonderful legacy of recordings over close to twenty-years that continues to resonate today with her dedicated global audience and beyond.