Donovan

Like Johnny Cash before him, Donovan was selected by producer Rick Rubin as a childhood hero he would like to restore to glory. With Rubin's encouragement and production, Donovan does make an impressive comeback with Sutras, which is reminiscent of his earliest records. Sutras abandons the colorful psychedelic pop of his best-known songs for the spare acoustic folk of his first records, and while Donovan's songwriting is a little uneven, the warmth of the performances is charming and welcoming, especially for long-time fans.

Original issue was called "Lady Of The Stars". Donovan re-recorded some old hits - "Season of the Witch" and "Sunshine Superman" - and cut some new songs for this independent label release. The result is a pleasant, but inconsequential, effort.

This compilation, the first ever on compact disc in America, features the best of Donovan's early landmark work including his first single Catch The Wind and classic tracks such as Colours and Turquoise; successful protest songs such as Universal Soldier and tracks from his first two British albums "What's Bin Hid and What's Bin Did" and "Fairytale." Although these records did feature the occasional sideman, it was mostly just Don, singing some of his most poignant and expressive songs while interpreting favorites by other writers such as Bert Jansch and Buffy St, Marie.
In later years Donovan adapted his style to explore the psychedelic revolution but these early simple songs are considered to be among his best…

Rock music's first two-LP box set, A Gift from a Flower to a Garden overcomes its original shortcomings and stands out as a prime artifact of the flower-power era that produced it. The music still seems a bit fey, and overall more spacy than the average Moody Blues album of this era, but the sheer range of subjects and influences make this a surprisingly rewarding work. Essentially two albums recorded simultaneously in the summer of 1967, the electric tracks include Jack Bruce among the session players. The acoustic tracks represent an attempt by Donovan to get back to his old sound and depart from the heavily electric singles ("Sunshine Superman," etc.) and albums he'd been doing - it is folkier and bluesier (in an English folk sense) than much of his recent work.

Cosmic Wheels was Donovan's first album in three years to be aimed at mainstream listeners (as opposed to the audience of children and parents for HMS Donovan). For most onlookers, the passage of time meant that this record should have differed considerably from its predecessor, but no one could have expected what was on Cosmic Wheels, at least on side one - a suppression of all of the flowing lyricism that had been a hallmark of Donovan's previous work. In its place were awkward self-consciously heavy prog rock/hard rock stylings juxtaposed with sound effects, and all woven together in a loud and mostly tuneless and unmemorable first side. Starting with the title track, little of the new-style material worked, and the first six numbers here seem like the musical equivalent of a train wreck in slow motion - the presence of such notable names as Suzi Quatro and others in the contingent of participating musicians notwithstanding…

Under the production aegis of Andrew Oldham, Donovan amassed a small army of stellar backup musicians for Essence to Essence, which followed its predecessor, Cosmic Wheels, by only ten months, indicating that he was intent on reestablishing his status in the pop music world. Although the album was recorded at Morgan Studios in England, its session players were a mix of British and American names including not only locals Peter Frampton, Nicky Hopkins, Danny Thompson, and Ray Cooper, but also a batch of people apparently flown in from Los Angeles, including Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock, and Russell Kunkel,. Thus, various former members of Wings and Derek and the Dominos rubbed shoulders with the standard backup staff for James Taylor and other singer/songwriters, as well as some stars in their own right…