Welcome to this week's Release Round-Up! Rod McKuen, New Ballads (Real Gone Music) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada) Real Gone celebrates the late Rod McKuen with a slate of releases this week. For the 1970 album New Ballads, the singer-songwriter teamed with renowned arranger-conductor Don Costa for this remarkable collection of songs including "As I Love My Own," the dramatic Jacques Brel collaboration "I'm Not Afraid," "Thank You for Christmas," and a composition which
On January 31, Stage Door Records will revisit a short-lived yet ambitious 1961 Broadway musical from the co-writer of Damn Yankees and The Pajama Game. For his first musical since the baseball-centric Damn Yankees, composer-lyricist Richard Adler (working solo following the 1955 death of his partner Jerry Ross) turned his attention to a very different subject. Kwamina (which translates to "born on Sunday") recounted the (fictional) life story of Peter Kwamina Mwalla, the son of a West African