"Every artist who has released as many albums as Morrison is bound to have one that gets overlooked, underrated. And that record to me is Morrison’s third, His Band & The Street Choir, which came out the same year as Moondance."
Like some kind of child actor, it feels like we’ve seen Beck grow up and mature before our very eyes. Along the way there have been any number of detours and excursions into foreign territory, but that’s why people love Beck, you never know what you’re going to get, you just know there’s always goin...
"It didn’t take long for Simone to hit her stride and justify Philips’s investment. Her next album, I Put A Spell On You, which came out in June 1965, was arguably the best album of her career — only Wild Is The Wind rivals it."
"Goats Head Soup is an album that often gets overlooked in The Stones’ catalogue and while it’s not a classic it doesn’t deserve to be consigned to the scrapheap. You can certainly hear The Stones trying new things on a couple of tracks and that alone makes it more than a curiosity."
"Rolling Stone regards Talking Book among the top 60 albums ever made — and that’s quite the compliment. When it came out, critic Vince Aletti said the album was 'ambitious', 'richly-textured', and 'exceptional' and 'the work of a now quite mature genius'. And that’s quite the compliment, too."
"For whatever reason, Lucinda Williams continues to fly under the radar. One day, we’ll all wake up and realise what a treasure she is. We’ll all appreciate the music she has gifted us."
"The thing that sets Elvis Costello apart from many of his peers is his command of the English language. He’s always had a nice turn of phrase. This is the guy who drops lines like 'you lack lust, you’re so lacklustre' into songs."
"In grouping these three artists together, I’m not suggesting they are cut from the same cloth because they aren’t. In Gambino’s case, music isn’t even his day job. It’s television."
"Jeff Tweedy writes songs that often reveal themselves slowly. They don’t hit you over the head, you have to tease out their charms. But he’s a master craftsman — a songwriter who's tuned to chords strung down his cheeks, bitter melodies turning his orbit around."
"Leonard Cohen’s music CV isn’t overly long — just 15 albums in the 52 years between 1967 and 2019 — but quantity never guarantees quality and there is a lot of quality in Cohen’s collection."