The Quiet Man

Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is an album by Paul McCartney released in 2005. A long time in the making, the set was produced by Radiohead and Beck collaborator Nigel Godrich at George Martin's suggestion.

Quiet though it may be, Paul McCartney experienced something of a late-career renaissance with the release of his 1997 album Flaming Pie. With that record, he shook off years of coyness and half-baked ideas and delivered an album that, for whatever its slight flaws, was both ambitious and cohesive, and it started a streak that continued through the driving rock & roll album Run Devil Run and its 2001 follow-up, Driving Rain. For Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, the follow-up to that record, McCartney tried a different tactic, returning to the one-man band aesthetic of his debut album, McCartney, its latter-day sequel, McCartney II, and, to a lesser extent, the home-spun second album, Ram…

Marc-André presents a fascinating juxtaposition of two composers who are not obviously musically related, but who are proved on this album to be a felicitous combination. Schumann’s well-loved Kinderszenen (‘Scenes from childhood’) cycle is a masterpiece: each piece is as deftly and exquisitely crafted as anything in his more outwardly sophisticated mode. From the haunting beauty of the opening ‘From foreign lands and people’ (‘Von fremden Ländern und Menschen’), via the spare eloquence of the central ‘Dreaming’ (‘Träumerei’), to the quiet rhetoric of ‘The poet speaks’ (‘Der Dichter spricht’), the listener is taken through nuances of emotion whose effects are heartrendingly poignant.

Harry Nilsson spent almost all of his rich, idiosyncratic, sometimes maddening career at RCA Records, releasing his bravura debut, Pandemonium Shadow Show, in 1967 and fading into the sunset with 1977's Knnillssonn. During those ten years, he released 14 albums and left behind a bunch of stray tracks, almost all of which are gathered on Legacy's massive and wonderful 2013 box The RCA Albums Collection…

British Beat was the term adopted to describe the exciting new sounds out of Liverpool and other cities in the wake of The Beatles' explosion onto the world stage in 1963/64. Named after the slang term forever associated with The Beatles, this mammoth 6-CD box set offers around 180 tracks in chronological order from the mid-1960s, many of which are new to CD and some of which are previously unissued. Fab Gear includes many of the era's biggest names such as The Kinks, The Moody Blues, The Searchers and The Tremeloes and other hit acts such as The Marmalade, The Alan Price Set, The Rockin' Berries, David & Jonathan, The Ivy League, Twinkle, Peter Jay & The Jaywalkers, Chad & Jeremy, The Tornados, Arthur Brown, Tony Jackson & The Vibrations, The Undertakers, Billie Davis, The Migil 5, The Truth, The Quiet Five and The Sorrows.

Scottish indie pop stalwarts the Trash Can Sinatras were founded outside of Glasgow in 1987 by singer/guitarist Frank Reader (the brother of ex-Fairground Attraction singer Eddi Reader), guitarists John Douglas and Paul Livingston, bassist George McDaid, and drummer Stephen Douglas. Initially formed as a cover band, they were performing in a local bar when they were discovered by Go! Discs label representative Simon Dine; their first single, the superb "Obscurity Knocks," appeared in early 1990, evoking the jangly guitar pop crafted by Scottish bands like Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, and Josef K a decade earlier. A second Trash Can Sinatras single, "Only Tongue Can Tell," preceded the release of the quintet's debut LP, Cake, which met with a positive response on both sides of the Atlantic; in the U.S., it became a particular favorite on college radio.