Punk rock's poet laureate Patti Smith ranks among the most influential female rock & rollers of all time. Ambitious, unconventional, and challenging, Smith's music was hailed as the most exciting fusion of rock and poetry since Bob Dylan's heyday…
Kerry Livgren was one of the founding members and primary writers for the '70s supergroup Kansas. Having grown up listening to the works of classical composers (notably the Romantics such as Liszt and Wagner), Livgren's songwriting technique has always tended toward orchestration – with an ear for the majestic or the symphonic…
Famed for their perennial "All Right Now," Free helped lay the foundations for the rise of hard rock, stripping the earthy sound of British blues down to its raw, minimalist core to pioneer a brand of proto-metal later popularized by 1970's superstars like Foreigner, Foghat and Bad Company. Free formed in London in 1968 when guitarist Paul Kossoff, then a member of the blues unit Black Cat Bones, was taken to see vocalist Paul Rodgers' group Brown Sugar by a friend, drummer Tom Mautner.
Mike Oldfield is a bit of an enigma. On the one hand is the artist who almost single-handedly ushered in the genre of new age music with his epic masterpiece Tubular Bells, and then followed that with several albums, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn, and even Tubular Bells II and III, all with tracks that invariable meandered for half an hour or more through various musical ideas and soundscapes – and no doubt would have gone on a lot longer had it not been for the constraints of vinyl and the restrictions on the length of musical compositions that would physically fit on two sides of a piece of plastic with micro grooves…
The Original Album Collection is a series which brings together a collection of albums from an artists catalogue, all together in one convenient and compact pack. Each album is packaged in the original artwork in a cardboard slipcase. This very interesting in that to my knowledge two of these albums, "Evangeline" and "Thirteen" have never been released on CD before. Probably because they were not among Emmylou's best sellers, Warner Bros. passed them over when they were churning out dismal versions of catalogue material. Lucky for us, in order to release this package Rhino had to master this pair of gems for the first time, and apparently decided to do it properly. The other three titles in this packaged have been released before and with the exception of "White Shoes" have even been re-mastered.