This was the first compilation in the CD era to offer unreleased material. It contains three unreleased tracks, including Henry and the H-Bomb (an unfinished demo), Lounge Lizard (the only MTH track recorded start-to-finish with Mick Ronson), and Through The Looking Glass (a 'special' version with profanity prepared as a joke for CBS executives). American Pie is not as interesting as it might appear - it is just a live recording of one verse, which was used as an intro to Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll.
So the story goes like this. Inspired by their work on the Leon Russell duet album The Union, producer T-Bone Burnett encouraged Elton John to return to making albums like he used to in the old days for 2013's The Diving Board, harking back to the days when he wrote quickly and recorded with little more than a rhythm section. This all sounds like a major shift in aesthetic for John, but Elton has been on a decade-long quest to tap into that old magic, beginning his voyage into the past with 2001's Songs from the West Coast and getting progressively elliptical with each subsequent release…
Film composer Carter Burwell, who scored Joel and Ethan Coen’s Netflix release, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is the next guest on The Hollywood Reporter's Behind the Screen podcast series.
Behind the Screen, hosted by THR tech editor Carolyn Giardina, features interviews with cinematographers, editors, composers, production designers and other creative talent behind the making of motion pictures.
Burwell has composed the music for more than 80 feature films, including 17 with the Coen brothers such as Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. He’s also a two-time Oscar nominee for Carol and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. …
Pieces of Me is a solo album by former Affinity vocalist Linda Hoyle.Only 300 copies of the album were pressed. One and only solo album from 1971 of former lead singer of Affinity. Remastered with unseen photos from Linda's personal album and notes by Linda and Mo Foster, on vinyl this album changes hands at a cool £150 a copy!
A Garland for Linda is a benefit album for the cancer-fighting organization the Garland Appeal. It is also a tribute album to Linda McCartney, who died of breast cancer in 1998. Her husband, Paul McCartney, contributes one selection, but it's not a pop song – it's a classical piece. It is one of ten classical pieces, all written for Linda McCartney, by such modern classical composers as John Tavener, Judith Bingham, David Matthews, John Rutter, Roxanna Ranufnik, Michael Berkeley, Giles Swayne, and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. The pieces are all similar in tone – gentle, sometimes somber, yet always sweet. There may not be any major works here, but everyone's heart is in the right place, and the result is a sentimental mood piece that floats charmingly on its affection.
Hip-O Select's triple-disc 2012 set The Killer Live (1964-1970) fills a bit of a gap in Jerry Lee's archival discography by rounding up his four officially released live albums for Smash and Mercury: Live at the Star Club, Hamburg and The Greatest Live Show on Earth, both released in 1964; By Request: More of the Greatest Live Show on Earth from 1966; and Live at the International, Las Vegas in 1970. The Killer Live expands these four LP by adding 16 bonus tracks, ten of which are previously unreleased, all of which are equally as good as the finished albums – and that means they're terrific, as good as rock & roll music gets.
Emmylou Harris once called her 1985 release The Ballad Of Sally Rose, one of the singer’s most personal albums, a country opera. The song cycle is based loosely on her short time with influential singer-songwriter Gram Parsons, who died in 1973. Known more for singing songs written by others, this was Harris’ first self-composed album and it remains one of her favourites.