Features / The Weekend Stream

Welcome back to another edition of The Weekend Stream, The Second Disc’s review of notable catalogue titles making digital debuts, plus new works from legacy acts and even some personally curated favorites. We’re mostly looking at albums dug up from the crates of 1976, but there’s also some unreleased goodies from Peggy Lee and David Allan Coe, plus plenty more.

Peggy Lee, My Guitar à la Lee (Capitol/UMe) (Apple / Amazon)

A new digital EP celebrates the 60th anniversary of the late songstress’ 1966 album Guitars à la Lee…sort of! My Guitar à la Lee spotlights two versions of “My Guitar,” recorded with arranger-conductor Quincy Jones for Peggy’s 1961 album If You Go but ultimately unused. She re-recorded “My Guitar” with arranger-guitarist Bob Bain and producer Dave Cavanaugh for Guitars à La Lee, and though that version isn’t here, three other highlights from the album are, including Tony Hatch’s “Call Me,” Luis Bonfa, Antonio Maria, and Norman Gimbel’s “Sweet Happy Life,” and Lew Spence and Alan & Marilyn Bergman’s “Nice ‘N’ Easy.” Robert Vosgien has restored and mastered the two 1961 outtakes.

Steven Price, Coyote vs. Acme (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (WaterTower Music) (Apple / Amazon)

The movie they didn’t want you to see has a soundtrack no one can stop you from listening to! Coyote vs. Acme, a wacky live-action/animated hybrid in which Looney Tunes stalwart Wile E. Coyote takes the Acme Corporation to court for years of failed product usage in his quest to catch the Road Runner, made headlines in 2023 when Warner Bros. shelved the completed film as a tax write-off, spurring immense backlash and a successful bid from distributor Ketchup Entertainment (who similarly rescued a Porky Pig/Daffy Duck feature, The Day the Earth Blew Up, from cinematic purgatory). Ahead of its wide release next weekend, the film’s score by Steven Price (an Oscar winner for the astronaut drama Gravity) is digitally available; what it lacks in classic Looney Tunes themes, it makes up for with sleek drama and amusing punctuations of “Beep! Beep!” from the London Voices choir.

David Allan Coe, Texas Moon (Deluxe Edition) (Sun) (Apple / Amazon)

Released in 1977, Texas Moon cast country outlaw Coe as a genre interpreter, covering the likes of Kris Kristofferson (“Why Me”), Johnny Cash (“Give My Love to Rose”) and Jackson Browne (“These Days”) alongside a few of his own originals. Two bonus tracks further flesh out these sessions: demos of another classic cover (the Guy Clark-penned “Desperados Waiting for a Train”) and an original (“Revenge”).

Candi Staton, “Young Hearts Run Free” (Breakbot Remix) (Warner/Rhino) (Apple / Amazon)

The French producer/DJ Breakbot offers his electro-fied take on Candi Staton’s 1976 R&B chart-topper.

The John Payne Band, The Razor’s Edge (Arista) (Apple / Amazon)

A fusion ensemble led by saxophonist Payne and keyboardist Louis Levin, The John Payne Band only issued two albums, and this – first heard on Arista’s aptly-named, free-jazz imprint Freedom – was the final of the two.

Eric Andersen, Sweet Surprise (Arista) (Apple / Amazon)

Folk stalwart Eric Andersen unexpectedly hit a wall when the follow-up to his well-received Blue River (1972) was indefinitely shelved after the masters were misplaced. (It was finally released in 1991, by which point Anderson was about to be one-third of Danko/Fjeld/Anderson, a group with The Band’s Rick Danko and Norwegian musician Jonas Fjeld.) After that setback, Anderson joined Arista for two albums, the latter of which is this 1976 obscurity.

Dave & Sugar, Dave & Sugar (RCA Victor) (Apple / Amazon)

Dave Rowland, a former member of J.D. Sumner’s Stamps Quartet, was part of Charley Pride’s backing band with singers Vicki Hackeman and Jackie Frantz. The trio proved such a draw onstage that RCA Victor got them a deal of their own, where they enjoyed slick pop-country hits like the genre chart-topper “The Door is Always Open” and Top 5 follow-up “I’m Gonna Love You.” Dave & Sugar’s 1976 self-titled debut – recorded long before Rowland sprinkled new and replacement members into Sugar – is now ready to stream.

Moe Bandy, Here I Am Drunk Again (Columbia) (Apple / Amazon)

An able follow-up to Bandy’s first Columbia album Hank Williams, You Wrote My Life (digitally delivered last week), Here I Am Drunk Again didn’t feature any Top 10 country singles but featured standouts like the title track and “She Took More Than Her Share.”

The Chuck Wagon Gang, The Sweetest Songs We Know (Columbia) (Apple / Amazon)

Active in some capacity for the past 90(!) years and one of the longest-tenured artists on Columbia Records, the country-gospel Chuck Wagon Gang was in fine form on this 1976 long-player.

Skip James, Devil Got My Woman (Remastered 2026) (Craft Recordings) (Apple / Amazon)

A notable Delta blues singer of the early 1930s, with a host of sides for the Paramount label, Skip James lived a life of obscurity after recording many of those sides, until a group of blues fans literally tracked him down at a Mississippi hospital in the early ’60s. (Son House was rediscovered around the same time, helping kickstart a blues revival.) James would play the Newport Jazz Festival and re-record many of his sides for Vanguard; this LP was his last work before dying of cancer in 1969, a year after Devil Got My Woman was re-released.

Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall (Remastered 2026) (Craft Recordings) (Apple / Amazon)

One of the best Chicago blues guitarists not on the Chess label, Reed’s 1961 live double album gets a second look from Craft, though this digital remastering only features the first LP of the album, which featured a take on his then-recent hit “Bright Lights, Big City.”

Chalino Sanchez, Adiós a Chalino (Remastered 2026) (Craft Recordings) (Apple / Amazon)

Another posthumous digital delivery for the King of Corrido, backed by Los Amables del Norte.

Bill Cantos, The Music of A&M Revisited (Bill Cantos Music) (Apple / Amazon)

Singer, songwriter, and pianist Bill Cantos – a veteran of the bands of both the late Burt Bacharach and, currently, Herb Alpert – has delivered a new studio set. The Music of A&M Revisited pays tribute to the songs that built Alpert and Jerry Moss’ A&M Records label, all imaginatively conceived in a jazz style. Cantos’ arrangements of such staples as Bacharach and David’s “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” The Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You,” and Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” are loving and fresh. Herb Alpert joins Cantos, bringing his burnished trumpet tone to Supertramp’s “Logical Song,” while Cantos inventively blends Lalo Schifrin’s “Down Here on the Ground” with Carole King and Toni Stern’s “It’s Going to Take Some Time” so it’s difficult to discern where one song ends and the other begins. For fans of the A&M catalogue with an appetite for jazz reinvention, The Music of A&M Revisited is a treat from start to finish.

This Ain’t No Disco: Songs from the Musical (World Premiere Recording) (Center Stage Records) (Apple / Amazon)

Center Stage Records premieres a new studio recording of the electrifying musical by Stephen Trask (Hedwig and The Angry Inch) and Peter Yanowitz (The Wallflowers, Natalie Merchant). The musical had its premiere in 2018 at New York’s Atlantic Theatre Company, but this album assembles an all-star cast to immortalize the score including Hedwig stars John Cameron Mitchell and Lena Hall, Sean Ono Lennon, Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, and Broadway stars such as Lilli Cooper, Eddie Cooper, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Chillina Kennedy, Adam Chanler-Berat, and Brandon Uranowitz. No physical edition has been announced as of this writing.

The Lazours, Night Side Songs (Arts Music/Warner) (Apple / Amazon)

Arts Music has the cast recording of The Lazours’ musical Night Side Songs, which played an acclaimed run earlier this year at Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT 3 space. The duo The Lazours’ folk-infused score is performed by the original cast including Robin de Jesus, Brooke Ishibashi, Jonathan Raviv, Kris Saint-Louis, and Mary Testa. An in-studio audience captured the sing-along spirit of the original stage production. CD and vinyl versions are planned for later this year.

Engelbert Humperdinck, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (Cleopatra) (Apple/ Amazon)

Engelbert drops the final pre-release single from his upcoming album, Faithfully, due next week from Cleopatra. “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” is the chart-topping, Diane Warren-penned Aerosmith ballad from 1998, and it’s here given the expectedly smooth Humperdinck treatment.

Sandi Patty, “The Voice I Have Now” (Gaither Music) (Apple / Amazon)

Christian music legend and five-time Grammy winner Sandi Patty returns with a poignant new ballad penned by Joel Lindsey. “The Voice I Have Now” is every bit as powerful as the voice this artist – whose last album was a 2017 live document of her farewell tour – has always had.

PASSINGS

Frank Beard (1949-2026)

One of the most quietly powerful drummers in rock history, Frank Beard joined Billy Gibbons in ZZ Top in 1969 and never looked back, except to introduce the singer/guitarist to a friend he’d played with around Dallas, Texas: bassist Dusty Hill, who completed the group’s ironclad line-up a year later. With a natural gift for Southern swing and a mean fill – who hasn’t air-drummed or tapped their school binders along to that intro to “La Grange”? – Beard (who ironically mostly sported a mustache while Gibbons and Hill grew theirs to nearly two feet) was the beating heart of ZZ Top for decades, versatile and sturdy enough to even play to the precision rhythm machines that powered the group’s unlikely 1983 pop crossover Eliminator. Just as with Hill in 2021, Beard wanted ZZ Top to live beyond him, and so Gibbons will continue with Hill’s bass tech Elwood Francis and Beard’s substitute Michael Monahan. But we’ll never forget what the classic incarnation of that little ole’ band from Texas has done for us.

Janie Bradford (1939-2026)

TSD remembers Janie Bradford, an original member of the Motown family. If you didn’t know Janie, you knew the songs she famously co-authored – an A-list including Barrett Strong (and, later, The Beatles’) “Money (That’s What I Want),” Diana Ross and The Supremes’ “Honey Bee (Keep On Stinging Me),” The Temptations and Marvin Gaye’s “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” The Marvelettes’ “Sunshine Days,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Contract on Love,” just to name a few. Starting out as the company’s first receptionist, Bradford worked her way up the rungs of the Motown ladder. She became the label’s head of Writer Relations for its publishing arm, Jobete, and nurtured the talents behind the hits. After leaving Motown, Bradford founded the Heroes and Legends (HAL) Awards, celebrating music titans with a yearly ceremony which raised money for scholarships to sustain the new generation of artists. Her legacy of philanthropy and music promises to live on.

Nick Glennie-Smith (1951-2006)

Though this British musician first rose to prominence as a keyboardist who collaborated with Roger Waters, Roger Daltrey, Leo Sayer, Cliff Richard and others, Nick Glennie-Smith was perhaps best known for his contributions to the world of film scoring. A key member of Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions team, Glennie-Smith was a utility player for the iconoclastic composer, working as a conductor, orchestrator, performer and even co-writer (as on the Alcatraz-set action flick The Rock). His versatility led to credits on luminary films like The Lion King (for which he conducted the chorus heard above), Bad Boys, Mission: Impossible 2, the Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers series, The Simpsons Movie and many others. His consummate professionalism only added to his respect, and he’ll be missed by the soundtrack community.