Joni Forest

City Music is an airplane descending over frozen lakes into Chicago. City Music is riding the Q Train out to Coney Island to smell the ocean and a morning in Philadelphia where greats cranes reconfigure the buildings like an endless puzzle. City Music is a quiet afternoon moment on a bench in Baltimore, a highway in Seattle at night where the distant houses look like tiny flames and a bottle of red wine being drained on a bridge in Paris. City Music is a bus pulling into St. Louis at dawn where the arch looks like a metal rainbow reflecting the days early sunlight…. City Music is also the new album by Kevin Morby. Full of listless wanderlust, it’s a collection inspired by and devoted to the metropolitan experience across America and beyond by a songwriter cast from his own mould. As he puts it: “It is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.”

At the heart of 'Serpent Power,' the second full length from Celestial Trax (born Joni Judén), lives an organic entity; its sounds roll over the listener like an unknown weather pattern. The intoxicating textures and strange dimensions are designed to cultivate the imagination away from screens: it is music for the journey inward, an ode to stillness. It models itself after the unpredictable yet harmonious sequencing of the natural world. Stepping away from the exhausting, hyper-saturated cyber-dystopia we've been thrust into, 'Serpent Power' envisions a world where technologies aren't aimed at our brains and our souls in order paralyze and control us. Instead, they’ve been modeled after nature in order to elevate us…

Heather Findlay, former lead vocalist and key songwriter with Mostly Autumn 1997-2010, since leaving the band has continually assembled a line-up of world class musicians to form the Heather Findlay Band/Trio and side project Mantra Vega…

This double CD contains all four of the Toronto singer/songwriter's '60s studio albums (the live LP Sunday Concert, not included here, was also released in the '60s). On these records, his resonant vocals, lyrical ambition, and melodic strengths produced as close a rival to Bob Dylan as Canada ever fashioned during that decade, and foreshadowed work by other major Canadian singer/songwriters of the late '60s, such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen.

Johnny Cash was one of the most imposing and influential figures in post-World War II country music. With his deep, resonant baritone and spare percussive guitar, he had a basic, distinctive sound. Cash didn't sound like Nashville, nor did he sound like honky tonk or rock & roll. He created his own subgenre, falling halfway between the blunt emotional honesty of folk, the rebelliousness of rock & roll, and the world-weariness of country. Cash's career coincided with the birth of rock & roll, and his rebellious attitude and simple, direct musical attack shared a lot of similarities with rock. However, there was a deep sense of history – as he would later illustrate with his series of historical albums – that kept him forever tied with country. And he was one of country music's biggest stars of the '50s and '60s, scoring well over 100 hit singles…