The Whispering Land

A 19-CD box set? Twenty one and a half hours of music? A 72-page book? Artefacts that include a receipt for her first piano? Who said the music industry no longer had money to burn?
For anybody unfamiliar with Sandy Denny’s yearning, evocative songs, her teeteringly vulnerable vocal style and the erratic contours of a career that ended shockingly in a fall downstairs in 1978 when she was 31, this eye-watering project may seem like ludicrous indulgence.

For roughly half a decade, from 1968 through 1975, the Band was one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the public) as seriously as the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Their albums were analyzed and reviewed as intensely as any records by their one-time employer and sometime mentor Bob Dylan. Although the Band retired from touring after The Last Waltz and disbanded several years later, their legacy thrived for decades, perpetuated by the bandmates' respective solo careers as well as the enduring strength of the Band's catalog.