“Prince” Phillip Mitchell is in some mighty good company. The Kentucky-born singer and songwriter, who rose to prominence composing songs for deeply soulful artists including Millie Jackson and Bobby Womack, is the latest to receive a career retrospective from Ace Records’ Songwriters and Producers series. With the Ace/Kent release of Something New to Do: The […]
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Engage! Another film score from the Star Trek universe has been expanded on CD; this time, it's the score to 1998's Star Trek: Insurrection. The third Trek film to feature the crew of the USS Enterprise-D as featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation (although this film, like its predecessor First Contact, finds the crew manning the Enterprise-E), First Contact finds Picard, Riker and […]
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For the title of their 1970 album on the Kama Sutra label, the members of Hackamore Brick opined that One Kiss Leads to Another. One album clearly didn’t lead to another, though, as the four-man Brooklyn band didn’t release more music until 2009 – and even then, with only two of the founding members. Yet […]
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Universal's U.K. arm will expand Kim Wilde's Close (1988) for its 25th anniversary with a two-disc set full of rare and unreleased remixes on September 2. Wilde's sixth album was her biggest success to date, a U.K. Top 10 album with four huge hits to its name in "Hey Mister Heartache" and Top 10 singles […]
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Often unfairly slighted in the pantheon of great soul musicians in the 1970s, a new U.K. compilation gives Bobby Womack his due, anthologizing every one of his single sides from the first nine years of his solo career. Womack and his brothers, Friendly, Curtis, Harry and Cecil, started from the small clubs of Cleveland before […]
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For Daryl Hall, "Every Time You Go Away" might have been "the one that got away." Hall recorded his song on Hall and Oates' 1980 album Voices, where it languished as an album track in the shadow of hit singles "Kiss on My List," "You Make My Dreams," "How Does It Feel to Be Back," […]
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One could call bassist Ronnie Baker, guitarist Norman Harris and drummer Earl Young unsung heroes, but it’s not quite accurate to describe the triumvirate of musicians, songwriters, producers and arrangers as unsung. Individually or collectively, Baker, Harris and Young helmed productions by Blue Magic, The Trammps, First Choice, Ben E. King, Eddie Kendricks, The Whispers, […]
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Peter Gabriel's So box set, released last year, was the subject of much controversy. Many fans wondered why Gabriel's team would offer "DNA" tracks of the songs from the album coming together instead of the many B-sides and remixes that have yet to be anthologized on CD. They bemoaned the lack of 5.1 surround mixes and […]
Continue ReadingSay “yes” to Merry Clayton! It takes a certain kind of talent to exercise restraint, to be able to generously support another artist while maintaining your own high standard of art, expression and individuality. That’s the story of the background singer, and the story told by director Morgan Neville in his new film 20 Feet […]
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Merry Clayton, The Best of Merry Clayton (Ode/Legacy) Tell all the people: the singer who gave The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" its soulful grit recorded several LPs for Lou Adler's Ode label. In honor of her belated star turn in the new documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom, Legacy has released the first-ever compilation of selections from these works, […]
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