The Great American

Rod Stewart has been mining the Great American Songbook for the better part of a decade, so it would only make sense that he would get a little bit better as time goes by. And, by some stroke of fate, Fly Me to the Moon – the fifth installment in this never-ending series and first since 2005, as Rod spent the back half of the 2000s taking songbook detours into rock and soul – is Stewart’s best album in the entire series…

Fourth album, same as the first. Ever since he successfully reinvented himself as a lazy lounge singer in 2002 with It Had to Be You: The Great American Songbook, Rod Stewart has been reliable as clockwork, releasing a collection of classic pop standards – predictable choices performed predictably – every second or third week of October…

Rod Stewart has been mining the Great American Songbook for the better part of a decade, so it would only make sense that he would get a little bit better as time goes by. And, by some stroke of fate, Fly Me to the Moon – the fifth installment in this never-ending series and first since 2005, as Rod spent the back half of the 2000s taking songbook detours into rock and soul – is Stewart’s best album in the entire serie…

This unusual CD features the great Betty Carter performing live with the great Carmen McRae, both having fun as they share the spotlight. Betty's voice is higher and sweeter than Carmen's lower, stronger, and more assertive voice, but together they sound like extensions of each other, almost alteregos, as they interact, engage in delightful patter, and joke and obviously mug with the audience. This is a CD for which one yearns for a video, since these two megastars of jazz are so in sync that it's sometimes difficult to tell which one is singing in these unusually long tracks. ~ Amazon Customer's Review

Billy Bragg & Joe Henry - Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad (2016) {Cooking Vinyl COOKCD623}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 271 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 102 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 156 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Billy Bragg / Cooking Vinyl | COOKCD623
Acoustic / Folk / Blues / Americana

In March 2016 Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, guitars in hand, boarded a Los Angeles-bound train at Chicago’s Union Station looking to reconnect with the culture of American railroad travel and the music it inspired. Winding along 2,728 miles of track over four days, the pair recorded classic railroad songs in waiting rooms and at trackside while the train paused to pick up passengers.

The Great American Songbook Collection contains all four volumes of Rod's groundbreaking series plus a bonus DVD of live recordings and the music videos for 'These Foolish Things' and 'Time After Time'…

Filmed at an exclusive one-night only concert in November 2002 in New York, Rod's new DVD release features live versions of his recent classic American recordings, plus a selection of his classics…