Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up, featuring a selection of the new titles available today. As an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Various Artists, NOW Yearbook: Vault ’82 (NOW Music) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada) The U.K.’s NOW line continues with another Vault installment spotlight hits of 1982 including The Who’s “Athena,” Elton John’s “Empty Garden,” Neil Diamond’s “Heartlight,” Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” and much more from a cross-section of artists and genres. Out today in the U.K.; available next Friday in North America….
Marshmallow World: Legacy Reissues Christmas Classics from Andy, Perry, Dean, Elvis, Johnny, Kenny and Dolly, and More
October is upon us, and while 2020 hasn’t given us much to rejoice about, the holiday season is almost here. Before the month is out, radio stations will begin switching to seasonal formats, and television will begin showing yuletide movies. With a never-ending barrage of bad news, “we need a little Christmas right this very minute” has hardly seemed more apt. Sony’s Legacy Recordings is getting a head start on Christmas this year with the release on vinyl of 10 favorite albums from the vaults of Columbia, RCA, Arista, and more. On…
Sweeter Than Wine: “This Magic Moment” Compiles Brill Building Nuggets
Today, 1619 Broadway in the heart of New York City’s theatre district doesn’t particularly stand out. Despite the building’s ornate façade, 1619 appears to be just another office building on a busy thoroughfare populated with every kind of attention-grabbing signage. But this building – along with its neighbor to the north, 1650 Broadway – is as much a part of rock and roll history as Sun Studios or Abbey Road. 1650 is the one and only Brill Building, incubator to some of the finest songs in the American popular canon. For a…
Jerry Lee Lewis, The Ronettes, Del Shannon, Louis Armstrong Feature On “The London American Label 1964”
1964 will forever be remembered on American shores as the year of Beatlemania, when those four moptops from Liverpool led the British Invasion to the top of the pop charts. That tale has been chronicled many times, but one of the most recent releases from U.K.-based label Ace tells the story of the year’s American Invasion – via the American records imported to London on the London American label. This latest volume in the long-running series (which now features an entry for each year between 1956 and 1964) may be the most…
Songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil Are “Born to Be Together” on New Ace CD
Born to Be Together: could a more apropos title have been devised for a collection of the songs of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil? Married since 1961, the team both defines and defies the phrase “unsung heroes.” Without hit records as recording artists, Mann and Weil have never had the name recognition of their Brill Building-era compatriots like Carole King or Neil Sedaka, but these Grammy Award-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famers are hardly unsung. If all they’d ever written was the most played song of the twentieth century, The Righteous…
Be My Baby: Sundazed Preps Spector Reissues On Vinyl
It’s once again time to go back to mono. Sundazed has just announced the vinyl reissue of four classic albums from Phil Spector’s Philles label. On July 31, The Ronettes’ Presenting The Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica by the Ronettes; Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans; and The Crystals’ Uptown and He’s A Rebel will all receive the Sundazed treatment. All four albums were reissued on CD last year from Phil Spector Records and Legacy Recordings as part of The Philles Album Collection box set, but this Sundazed campaign marks…
Review: Phil Spector, “The Philles Album Collection” and “The Essential Phil Spector”
Whoa-oh, a-whoa-oh-oh-oh! Think of The Ronettes’ wail, every bit as iconic a cry as a-whop-bop-a-loo-a-whop-bam-boom. Doesn’t rock and roll have a way of elevating onomatopoeia to poetry? And no label made sweeter poetry in the first half of the 1960s than Philles Records. The voices of Ronnie Spector, Darlene Love, La La Brooks, Barbara Alston and the rest spoke directly to America’s teenagers. These women, alternately vulnerable and defiant, were little more than girls when they began putting their voices to the “little symphonies” being crafted by producer Phil Spector and his house arrangers,…
Release Round-Up: Week of October 24/25
It’s Tuesday, but most of the new music this week has already been out for a day. But assuming you were too busy to get out to the shops, here’s a look at what’s new. And there’s quite a bit! Various Artists, Phil Spector Presents The Philles Album Collection (Phil Spector Records/Legacy) Six of the first seven Philles albums presented in mono, along with a bonus disc of those delightfully out-there instrumental B-sides. Seriously, have you heard any of them? They’re crazy. In a good way, that is. Diana Ross & The Supremes,…
FINAL UPDATE 8/4: “Phil Spector Presents the Philles Album Collection” and “Essential Phil Spector” Due From Legacy
Well, get a load of that! This is the photo I’ve been waiting for – and if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been waiting with bated breath, too! As of August 4, we have official confirmation that Legacy’s Phil Spector Presents the Philles Album Collection is, indeed, coming on October 18, along with a two-disc retrospective as part of the label’s long-running Essential series. Most purchasers of Legacy’s first wave of Philles Records reissues last February took immediate notice of a full-color insert which promised a most exciting June release sure to grab everyone’s…
Crossing the Pond: “London American Label 1963” Spotlights Spector and More
It’s 1963. Imagine a label that counted Roy Orbison, Darlene Love, James Brown, The Drifters and Jerry Lee Lewis all among its artists. While such an array of talent never convened under one roof in America, it was a very different story in the United Kingdom. The U.K.’s Decca Record Company indeed brought all of those artists, and more, under the umbrella of its London American label. London American delivered the best in American pop, R&B and rock and roll to British audiences. Ace is another British label bringing the best of…
Review: The Crystals, The Ronettes and Darlene Love: “The Very Best Of”
If Phil Spector didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him. Spector scored his first chart-topper as writer, artist and arranger in 1958 with “To Know Him is to Love Him” performed his by group, the Teddy Bears. But a 1960 apprenticeship with famed songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller convinced the ambitious young man that his future was behind the scenes as a producer. (His 1960 stint with Leiber and Stoller also yielded “Spanish Harlem,” which Spector co-wrote with Leiber.) With Lester Sill, he founded Philles (Phil + Les) Records…
Review: Various Artists, “Wall of Sound: The Very Best of Phil Spector 1961-1966”
In another time, in another place, I would not be writing this review of Legacy’s new Phil Spector compilation with a slight pang of melancholy. And you wouldn’t be reading it with the possible tug at the heartsrings you might face now. Phil Spector was one of the most significant pop producers of the 20th century – a creator of pop music as a blissful, romantic, universal commodity – but recent events have ensured that anyone who speaks his name today does so with hesitation, with knowledge of something too awful to…
Be Their Baby: Legacy Preps Releases for Crystals, Ronettes and Darlene Love (UPDATED 1/17)
When Sony announced in September 2009 that rights had been acquired from EMI Music Publishing to reissue Phil Spector’s Philles catalogue after years of neglect from the ABKCO label, great anticipation was in the air. A major campaign was planned by Sony’s Legacy division with projects in development including “Artist’s Playlists, Best-of collections, and first-ever releases of Philles studio rarities – as well as facsimile reproductions of original singles and albums,” but since that heady announcement, no product has materialized other than a remastered, straight reissue of 1963’s classic A Christmas Gift…












