Yesss!!! La-La Land Reissues Williams, Horner, Barry, Tiomkin Classics for Final 2015 Offering
A classic ’50s score and four popular ’90s soundtracks from three beloved composers make up La-La Land Records’ exciting-as-always Black Friday announcements. This year, the label has prepped expanded reissues of Dimitri Tiomkin’s Giant (1956), 25th anniversary editions of John Williams’ Home Alone and John Barry’sDances with Wolves (both 1990) and two scores by the late James Horner: 1994’s The Pagemaster and 1995’s Braveheart. All five limited edition CD sets will be available to order on Tuesday, December 1. With Christmas just around the corner, it’s as appropriate as always to start…
THE SECOND DISC’S 2015 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE IS HERE!
We wouldn’t want you to be left out in the cold for Cyber Monday, so we’re proud to present our annual Holiday Gift Guide featuring nearly 75 essential selections for the music enthusiast in your life! We’ve filled the guide with box sets (such as the popular Bob Dylan title to your left!), archival releases and holiday music favorites. So Just click here to access this year’s picks! You’ll notice that the Gift Guide is in the same easy-to-use format as our Release Calendar, so you can search for a title by a favorite…
Release Round-Up: Week of November 27
To our U.S. readers, today is the day of shopping known as Black Friday – but happily, the diverse slate of releases due in stores today should lift your spirits – no matter where you’re located! Love, Reel to Real: Expanded Edition (High Moon Records) (Amazon U.S.) High Moon Records has the premiere reissue of Arthur Lee and Love’s 1974 album Reel to Real as a newly-expanded Deluxe Edition boasting a color, 32-page booklet. A vinyl edition will follow early next year. Read more here! America, Archives Volume One (America Records) (Amazon…
Ease On Down! Motown Unveils Lost Diana Ross Album For Digital Release
On the eve of NBC’s new production of The Wiz next week, Motown/UMe have dug into the vaults to release a lost album of songs from the Broadway musical by Diana Ross. The pairing, of course, is no mistake: the 1975 Tony Award-winning “super soul musical” was adapted into a film in 1978, with Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell and original cast member Ted Ross as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion, respectively. Produced by Motown and directed by Sidney Lumet, with a young Joel Schumacher adapting the show…
Say, Say, Say! The Second Disc’s Essential RSD Black Friday 2015 Release Guide
From all of us here at Second Disc HQ to all of you, we hope you’re enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving in the company of family and friends. Of course, from this day which conjures nostalgic and warm feelings comes a celebration of a different kind with this year’s annual Black Friday – the day for consumers to start off the holiday shopping season on a mad, frenetic note. But 2015 is just in the latest year in which numerous retailers in the U.S. have made headlines by blackening Thursday, or Thanksgiving Day…
Review: Frank Sinatra, “A Voice on Air: 1935-1955”
Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings’ new box set Frank Sinatra: A Voice on Air (88875 09971 2) begins, appropriately enough, with the jarring sound of an old-time radio tuning in. The shrill noise quickly segues to the first of nearly 100 performances on four CDs – 19-year old Frank Sinatra, one-fourth of The Hoboken Four, singing the perky “S-H-I-N-E” on WHN Radio’s The Major Bowes Amateur Hour. Here, then, is the future Chairman of the Board – before he sang for swingin’ lovers, before he did it his way – as a…
Tried, Tested and Found True: Big Break Expands Two By Ashford and Simpson
Big Break Records has recently continued its definitive reissue series chronicling Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson’ Warner Bros. years with the expanded releases of 1977’s So So Satisfied and 1980’s A Musical Affair. This pair follows previous titles in the series including Come As You Are, Send It and Is It Still Good to Ya and Stay Free. (Gimme Something Real and I Wanna Be Selfish arrive in January!) Though So So Satisfied found Ashford and Simpson still on the cusp of the greater commercial success that would greet their subsequent LPs, Is It Still…
A Culture Factory Christmas: Label Reissues Beach Boys, James Brown, “Charlie Brown” and…Wookiees!
The Culture Factory label, which reissues classic albums in limited edition mini-LP replica sleeves, has a trio of Christmas titles due this Friday likely to make spirits bright. The label has already released Vince Guaraldi’s oft-reissued soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas as an exclusive release for retailer FYE. It’s joined this week by straight reissues (no bonus material) of The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album and James Brown’s Soulful Christmas at general retail, as well as an Amazon-exclusive reissue of Meco’s Christmas in the Stars: The Star Wars Christmas Album. All titles…
It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas: Legacy Adds Amazon Exclusive 3-CD Set to “Classic Christmas Album” Series
With Thanksgiving this Thursday and Black Friday the day after, the Christmas season is officially upon us (if it hasn’t already arrived a couple of weeks ago!). There have been several Christmas reissues we’ve talked about so far this season, including the four new entries in Legacy’s Classic Christmas Album series. And now we’ve got information on a fifth entry for this year: the simply-titled Classic Christmas Album. And we’re also happy to say that this Amazon exclusive, 3-CD, 42-song set has been co-produced by our very own Mike Duquette! This new compilation…
Something Bad On Her Mind: Rare and Unreleased Timi Yuro Arrives From Cherry Red
There was only one Timi Yuro. The late, Chicago-born Italian-American vocalist was signed to Liberty Records as a teenager, bringing jazz and R&B influences into her emotional, heart-on-its-sleeve blue-eyed soul style. After having spent the first portion of her career at Liberty, Yuro departed the label in 1963. She was dubbed The Amazing Timi Yuro by Mercury Records for her Quincy Jones-produced LP debut there in 1964, but Mercury never followed it up with another long-player, opting instead for a number of single releases. By late 1967, Yuro was back at Liberty,…
Do You Know What I Mean: Lee Michaels Celebrated On New Box Set, Anthology
The enigmatic Lee Michaels is back. No, the cult favorite singer-songwriter who once graced the rosters of A&M and Columbia Records hasn’t recorded a new album; he’s been happily retired from the music business since the early 1980s. But Michaels has given his blessing to a definitive new compact disc box set collecting all seven of his A&M albums originally released between 1967 and 1973 as well as a new single-disc anthology drawing on the same period. Manifesto Records’ The Complete A&M Album Collection and Heighty Hi: The Best of Lee Michaels…
Release Round-Up: Week of November 20
Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up which continues this autumn’s tradition of having each week packed with box sets from heavy hitters – in this case, The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, The Who, Queen, Grateful Dead, Frank Sinatra, and they’re still not all! Plus: CD and vinyl reissues, anthologies, and much more! The Beach Boys, Beach Boys’ Party: Uncovered and Unplugged (Capitol) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K.) The first disc of this 2-CD, 81-track set features the original 1965 Beach Boys Party! album as remixed in original, pre-overdubbed form and then…
Go Crazy: Varese Collects “The Very Best of Paul Davis”
With hits like “Cool Night,” “I Go Crazy” and “’65 Love Affair,” Paul Davis established himself as one of the most appealing singer-songwriters of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet the Mississippi native all but walked away from his solo career at the height of his fame, returning to his roots as a behind-the-scenes songwriter and making cameo appearances on others’ hit records. Before his untimely death in 2008 at the age of 60, Davis notched fourteen Hot 100 hits and eight Top 40s. Many of those beloved songs have been collected…
One Less Egg To Fry: Raven Collects Four 5th Dimension Albums On Two CDs
Earlier this year, the Raven label collected The 5th Dimension’s first four albums, all originally released on Soul City between 1967 and 1969, as a 2-CD set. Now, Raven is happily continuing the story of Marilyn McCoo, Billy Davis Jr., Florence LaRue, Lamont McLemore and Ron Townson with a second collection of four albums on two CDs. 4 Classic Albums: Portrait/Love’s Lines, Angles and Rhymes/Individually and Collectively/Living Together, Growing Together has the group’s four Bell Records studio albums from 1970-1973 which found The 5th Dimension and producer Bones Howe exploring new musical…
Esoteric Offers Up Live Barclay James Harvest, Rarities From Tea and Symphony, Third World War
With a trio of recent releases, Cherry Red Group’s Esoteric Recordings imprint continues to dig through the archives to reissue some of the most intriguing offerings from the prog-rock era and beyond. John Lees founded Barclay James Harvest in 1966 with Les Holroyd, Mel Pritchard and Stuart “Wooly” Wolstenholme. After one single for EMI’s Parlophone imprint in 1968, the progressive four-piece was moved over to the Harvest imprint. Barclay James Harvest remained on Harvest for four LPs, but didn’t score their commercial breakthrough until a move to Polydor. The 1974 release of…
In Memoriam: P.F. Sloan (1945-2015)
Take a moment to consider a number of the songs written or co-written by Philip “P.F.” Sloan: “Secret Agent Man,” “Eve of Destruction,” “Let Me Be,” “Where Were You When I Needed You,” “You Baby,” “A Must to Avoid,” “Another Day, Another Heartache.” Yet the songwriter, who died on November 15 at the age of 70, may be best known for the bittersweet, elegiac ode penned by his colleague and admirer, Jimmy Webb. “I have been seeking P.F. Sloan,” Webb’s song begins. “But no one knows where he has gone…” In an…
John Williams’ Original “JAWS” Score Gets Deluxe, Expanded Edition From Intrada
Only shortly after their expansion of the score to JAWS 2, Intrada gives fans of the great white shark franchise a true reason to need a bigger boat, announcing a deluxe edition of John Williams’ iconic, Academy Award-winning soundtrack to Steven Spielberg’s JAWS. We’ve told the story behind the music before, in a Friday Feature from 2012. What’s important now is what fans can expect from this new release, the third issue of JAWS score on CD. According to Intrada’s product description, the first release of the original film score (Decca’s 25th anniversary edition from 2000) featured a distillation…
Sweetness and Light: Lush Prepare Career Box Set
Part shoegaze, part Britpop, Lush were one of the most interesting bands to come out of England in the 1990s–and with a reunion imminent, they’ve readied the definitive box set of their discography. The five-disc Chorus, available December 4, gathers all of Lush’s studio output in one set. The EP collection Gala (1990); studio albums Spooky (1992), Split (1994) and Lovelife (1996); and B-sides compilation Topolino (1996) will all be appended with additional material, including 16 unreleased tracks and countless uncollected rarities. The hardbound book package is designed by Chris Bigg, who helped…
Dreams Will Not Be Thwarted: New Springsteen Live Archive Release Arrives From 2013 Wrecking Ball Tour
A little over a month since the last release, a new installment in Bruce Springsteen’s live archive series has been released: Ippodromo Delle Capannelle, Rome, Italy, 2013. This concert from July 13, 2013 comes at the tail end of the Wrecking Ball Tour which had begun over a year earlier in March of 2012. A concert from right before this tour began, from March 9, 2012 at the Apollo Theater in New York, has been previously released by the Springsteen archive. Also previously released are numerous concerts from the High Hopes Tour which…
Review: Alanis Morissette, “Jagged Little Pill: Collector’s Edition”
As time marches on, nostalgia of course goes along with it. So, with the passage of time, we’ve arrived at an era of nostalgia for the 1990s. Hard as it may be for some to believe, 20th and 25th anniversaries for major releases in the ’90s keep occurring – and items are released in commemoration. Thus, Rhino has recently reissued Alanis Morissette’s 1995 smash album Jagged Little Pill in a variety of iterations including a 2-CD version and a 4-CD Collector’s Edition. When Morissette traveled to Los Angeles in the early ’90s…
Release Round-Up: Week of November 13
It may be Friday the 13th, but today’s choice releases are hardly scary, with box sets, archival releases, new music from veteran artists, and much, much more! Aretha Franklin, The Atlantic Albums Collection (Atlantic/Rhino) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K.) This 19-CD box set brings together 16 of the Queen of Soul’s Atlantic albums as previously released on CD including the deluxe 2-CD Live at Fillmore East, the 2-CD Rare & Unreleased Recordings From The Golden Reign Of The Queen Of Soul and Oh Me Oh My: Aretha Live in Philly 1972. There are no…
Graceful: Legacy Premieres Lost Recordings By Jeff Buckley On “You and I”
The countdown to 2016 has already begun! Legacy Recordings is one of the first out of the gate with big news for the New Year! On March 11, 2016, the label will release You and I, the very first studio recordings made by the late Jeff Buckley (1966-1997) for Columbia Records. This new compilation will be available on CD, DD, and LP. The recordings on this new 10-track collection (primarily recorded in Steve Addabbo’s Shelter Island Sound studio in February 1993) were discovered during the label’s research for the 20th anniversary edition of Buckley’s seminal…
Hurt So Bad: 7a Records Rescues “The First Bobby Hart Solo Album” With Expanded CD Reissue
The 7a Records label made a big splash earlier this year with its first-ever release. The MGM Singles Collection brought together Micky Dolenz’s rare MGM Records sides in a lavishly designed and annotated presentation that was a fan and collector’s dream. Now, we’re thrilled to report that the Monkees specialists at 7a are turning their attention to another key figure in Monkees lore with the first-ever CD release on December 7 of 1980’s aptly-titled The First Bobby Hart Solo Album. There was little Bobby Hart and his partner Tommy Boyce couldn’t accomplish. Subjects…
More Than “Lies”: Sundazed Collects The Knickerbockers’ “Challenge Recordings” On New Box Set
“Eighty tracks from a band with exactly one hit single?” That’s the question Sundazed Records is posing of its soon-to-be-released box set from The Knickerbockers. The hitmakers behind the British Invasion-esque “Lies” will be celebrated by Sundazed with the 4-CD, 80-track box The Challenge Recordings. It’s due in stores this Friday, November 13. The Top 20 hit “Lies” – and seminal inclusion in the original Nuggets – is just one of the tracks on this collection. Brothers Beau and John Charles of Bergenfield, New Jersey, formed The Knickerbockers in 1962 (named for…
Jump To The Beat! BBR Reissues Dancefloor Classics By Stacy Lattisaw, Karen Young
With a quartet of recent releases, Big Break Records continues to deliver to the highest standard in deluxe, remastered and generously expanded editions of R&B classics. Today, we turn the spotlight on two of those titles, from Stacy Lattisaw and Karen Young! Stacy Lattisaw was just 12 – yes, 12! – years old when she made her major label debut on Atlantic Records’ Cotillion imprint with Young and in Love. One of the final projects produced by Van McCoy before his untimely death, the album featured revivals of Ruby and the Romantics’ title…