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Most Popular Featured Releases

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 October 2016

John Varvatos Records B0025335-02-1802
Format: CD

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Amos Lee’s new album, Spirit, is his first for John Varvatos Records after his debut EP on Right at Home, five studio recordings for Blue Note, and a live set for ATO. Lee produced and recorded Spirit in Nashville, at Blackbird Studio and Sputnik Sound. His other records have shown the influences of everything from country and folk to jazz, but Spirit is full-on, gospel-inflected soul. In the very first track, “New Love,” Jaron Olevsky’s piano and Hammond B3 give clues that Lee has moved into a stronger R&B direction, but it’s the Stax-style horns that bring it home.

Read more: The Posies: "Solid States"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 August 2016

Fantasy FAN-39674-02
Format: CD

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Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle have both been around for some 30 years, each making music at the intersection of country, folk, and rock. In 2014, when Colvin asked Earle to join her for some shows late in that year, they discovered that their voices harmonized naturally. Their first recorded collaboration, Colvin & Earle, suggests that their songwriting styles mesh, too.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 July 2016

Universal Music Canada 025476J442
Format: CD

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In the fall of 1991, my wife and I went to see guitarist Eric Johnson at a club a few miles from our apartment. The opening act was The Tragically Hip, a band from Kingston, Ontario, about which I knew little beyond a single from 1989, “New Orleans Is Sinking,” which had gotten some airplay on a local rock station. The band was touring behind their second full-length album, Road Apples, released just a few months before we saw them.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 July 2016

Bushbranch/Surfdog 51279-2
Format: CD

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For about ten years, beginning in late 1963, Eric Clapton was such a hugely influential blues and rock guitarist that he created, with Jimi Hendrix, the concept of the guitar hero. His recordings with the Yardbirds, John Mayall, Cream, Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, and Derek and the Dominos helped define what it was to be a solo rock guitarist. He pushed himself to try new things, and every solo was exciting, fresh, and surprising.

Read more: Eric Clapton: "I Still Do"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 June 2016

ATO ATO0299
Format: CD

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My Morning Jacket’s fourth album, It Still Moves (2003), was the band’s major-label debut, and solidified the unique musical vision they’d established on their three records for Darla, an independent label. But Jim James, the band’s guitarist and leader, recently told the New York Times that he was never happy with the album’s sound. “‘It Still Moves’ is really the only record in our catalog that I’ve always felt I wanted to remix,” he said.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 June 2016

My Block/eOne Music EOM-CD-9439
Format: CD

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Life on Earth is Musiq Soulchild’s seventh solo album since he began recording, in 2000, and his first since leaving Atlantic for My Block Records, an indie run by producer Warryn Campbell. The singer, aka Taalib Johnson, mixes hip-hop, rhythm and blues, and jazz in a way that’s fresh and appealing to young listeners, while also accessible to old-school R&B fans like me. He writes songs that are melodically engaging, and even when he uses recent recording techniques, such as sampling and Auto-Tune, he doesn’t let them overwhelm or define his music.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 May 2016

Santana IV Records S4007
Format: CD

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It’s tough being a fan of Carlos Santana. He is indisputably one of the great guitarists of the classic-rock era, but his recordings with the various iterations of his band have been wildly erratic. The original lineup of his eponymous band split up after three very good records, and some of the music that followed, such as Caravanserai (1972) and Welcome (1973), was up to the standard set by that original group. Other releases, such as Inner Secrets (1978) and Zebop! (1981), fell short.