Donovan

The follow-up to Aoife O'Donovan's 3x Grammy nominated album, Age of Apathy, All My Friends is based around a collection of songs Aoife wrote, inspired by women's suffrage and the passage of the 19th amendment. The music is expansive with orchestral arrangements, choral vocals and a variety of instruments that create a sonic soundscape beyond anything Aoife has done in the past. Special guests include Anais Mitchell, Sierra Hull, The Westerlies, The Knights and the San Francisco Girls Choir.

This 1967 concert recorded at the Anaheim Convention Center, just a few weeks after his Hollywood Bowl show, was recorded in its entirety and released as a single LP with a total of 14 tracks. Flow in a Donovan concert is important, and here, presented as it occurred, listeners can drift right into the tidepool of magic. The band is a quintet with Harold McNair on flute and saxophones, Loren Newkirk on piano, Andy Tronosco on upright bass, Tony Carr on drums, and John Carr on bongos. Donovan plays acoustic guitar throughout. The hippy mysticism and flower power poet is everywhere here. This isn't rock star excess at all, but an organic, drenched-in-sunshine concert full of gentleness with a premium on good vibes.

Following the success of the Grammy award-winning album ‘The Goat Rodeo Sessions’, Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile return with their sensational new album ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’. ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’ combines the talents of the four solo artists, each a Grammy Award- winning talent in his own right, to create a singular sound that’s part composed, part improvised, and uniquely American. The music featured in this stunning album is so complex to pull off that the group likens it to a goat rodeo — an aviation term for a situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster. Both the first album and the new recording also feature the voice and artistry of singer-songwriter and fellow Grammy Award-winner Aoife O’Donovan, who joins the group as a guest on ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’.

An icon of flower power who emerged as a folksinger but later gained hits like "Sunshine Superman" with bright psychedelic pop. Upon his emergence during the mid-'60s, Donovan was anointed "Britain's answer to Bob Dylan," a facile but largely unfounded comparison which compromised the Scottish folk-pop troubadour's own unique vision. Where the thrust of Dylan's music remains its bleak introspection and bitter realism, Donovan fully embraced the wide-eyed optimism of the flower power movement, his ethereal, ornate songs radiating a mystical beauty and childlike wonder; for better or worse, his recordings remain quintessential artifacts of the psychedelic era, capturing the peace and love idealism of their time to perfection. The Very Best Of includes all of the Scottish folk rocker's biggest smashes. Features 'Mellow Yellow', 'Sunshine Superman', 'Hurdy Gurdy Man', 'Jennifer Juniper', 'Riki Tiki Tavi' & much more.

This CD could almost have been subtitled "The Lost Years," defining the period in which Donovan's records barely even made it into stores so that they could be ignored by the public - that had been the fate of Essence to Essence (which actually made it into stores), and 7-Tease and Slow Down World - each died an absolute commercial death in its wake. More's the pity, because there's a lot of beautiful (even gorgeous) and clever music here, a big chunk of it about as good as anything that Donovan ever put out. The zeitgeist behind the songs on these two albums may throw people who are accustomed to his '60s material, when Donovan had a wide listenership and was in sync with the times; here he's singing against his times (and mostly against indifference and self-involvement), and he is so beguiling musically and lyrically, that one feels a real sense of tragedy that these albums weren't more widely heard…

Paced by the title track, one of Donovan's best singles, 1966's Sunshine Superman heralded the coming psychedelic age with a new world/old world bent: several ambitious psychedelic productions and a raft of wistful folk songs…

Having Mickie Most as producer could be a double-edged sword. On The Hurdy Gurdy Man, his over-ambitious nature and scattershot production sense occasionally sabotaged Donovan's songs rather than emphasizing their strengths. (The credits shamelessly list "Produced by Mickie Most" and "A Mickie Most Production," right next to each other.) As with the last few LPs, the program began with the hit title track (one of Donovan's best singles), a dim, dark song balancing psychedelia with the heavier, earthier rock championed during 1968 by Dylan and the Beatles. Though the next two tracks - an eerie, trance-like "Peregrine" and the endearing acoustic number "The Entertaining of a Shy Girl" - are excellent performances, any sense of mood is soon shattered by a hopelessly overblown music-hall showtune, "As I Recall It"…

Donovan's second album found the Scottish folkie in possession of his own voice, a style of earnest, occasionally mystical musings indebted neither to Woody Guthrie nor Bob Dylan. True, Fairytale's highlights - "Sunny Goodge Street," "Jersey Thursday," and "The Summer Day Reflection Song" - use a sense of impressionism pioneered by Dylan, but Donovan flipped Dylan's weariness on its head. His persona is the wistful hippie poet, continually moving on down the road, but never bitter about the past. The folkie "Colours," already a hit before the album's release, is also here (though without Donovan's harmonica). A few of his songs are inconsequential and tossed-off ("Oh Deed I Do," "Circus of Sour"), but a few of these ("Candy Man" especially) succeed too, thanks to Donovan's effervescent delivery.