Roughly one year ago, Now Sounds released Windy: A Ruthann Friedman Songbook. Its colorful cover was adorned with a striking photograph of the artist, intense and beautiful, in a verdant setting. The label has now continued the Ruthann Friedman story with The Complete Constant Companion Sessions, and its cover is as to Windy’s as night is to day. Its stark black-and-white line art by Peter Kaukonen appears to depict an angel on a landscape of rolling hills, conjuring cryptic text and an
Welcome to The Second Disc’s Fourth Annual Gold Bonus Disc Awards! Though this is a slow time of year for news, it’s the perfect time to look at the year in review. As with every year’s awards, our goals are simple: to recognize as many of the year’s most essential reissues and catalogue titles as possible, and to celebrate those labels, producers and artists who make these releases possible in what many might deem an increasingly-challenging retail landscape. These labels have bucked the
A look at the intense visage of Ruthann Friedman on the cover photograph of Now Sounds’ Windy: A Ruthann Friedman Songbook reveals those “stormy eyes that flash at the sound of lies,” but a listen to the sounds within shows the artist spreading her “wings to fly above the clouds.” For here is an entire disc’s worth of never-before-heard pop nuggets, crafted with a delicacy and beauty to match that photo. Windy, of course, is so named, of course, for The Association’s 1967 No. 1 hit penned by