Gordon Lightfoot Harmony

Gordon Lightfoot’s best songs have never been overly complicated things. Save for some light backing flourishes, classics such as “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” and “If You Could Read My Mind” are little more than his poetry and philosophical wanderings on full display. With Solo, a suite of stripped-back vocal-and-acoustic-guitar songs, there’s even less for the legendary Canadian singer-songwriter to hide behind. While it’s his first newly heard music since 2004’s Harmony, the writing actually predates that album. Lightfoot happened upon a cache of material he’d first recorded in 2001 and 2002, just prior to suffering an aortic aneurism, while cleaning his Toronto home. He took the demos and attempted to arrange them for his band, but ultimately decided to redo them with almost no additional production. The result has a particularly live-sounding immediacy and intimacy, which suits the subject matter, whether it’s the prescient “E-Motion” (which explores oversharing in the internet age), the wistful opener “Oh So Sweet,” or the reflective “Return Into Dust.” At age 81 and 21 albums in, though, Lightfoot is most revealing on the closer, “Why Not Give It a Try,” a track about keeping life fresh and challenging, and never slowing down.

Sounds of the Seventies was a 38-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, spotlighting pop music of the 1970s. Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Sounds of the Seventies" series covered a specific time period, including individual years in some volumes, and different parts of the decade (for instance, the early 1970s) in others; in addition, some volumes covered specific trends, such as music popular on album-oriented rock stations on the FM band. Each volume was issued on either compact disc, cassette or (with volumes issued prior to 1991) vinyl record.

New Haven '76 represents Elvis' summer tour from 23rd July to August 5th 1976. Many Elvis fans consider this to be Elvis' worst Summer tour (apart from abysmal performances in Late August before things 'improved') The Tour coming straight after the three 'bodyguard' sackings finds Elvis on 'auto pilot' and (mostly) singing the absolute minimum of songs in a lacklustre manner…