For some, Bruce Cockburn needs no introduction. However, just as many (maybe more) are unfamiliar with the persevering Canadian singer-songwriter’s talents, a reality Tompkins Square’s Josh Rosenthal fully understands. Rather than leave this deficiency unaddressed, James Toth Presents… Imaginational Anthem Vol. XIII – Songs of Bruce Cockburn arrives April 5 on LP, CD, and digital. Featuring nine readings of Cockburn songs by an impressive cohort of contemporary indie artists including Jerry David DeCicca with Bill Callahan, Powers Rolin Duo, Wet Tuna, and the set’s curator in the duo Armory Schafer, the album is poised to enlighten newbies while satisfying longtime Cockburn fans.

In the notes to this worthwhile set, Josh Rosenthal lays out his reasons for following up Imaginational Anthem Vol. XII, a multi-artist tribute to the late guitarist Michael Chapman, with a similar goodwill gesture. In short, it pertained to a nagging disrespect to Cockburn through oversight from a listenership that’s clued into a younger, edgier, and more indie-aligned scene.

It bears mentioning that Cockburn is a certifiably huge deal in Canada, as knowledge of his artistry has also spread elsewhere. While never as big in the USA as he was at home, Cockburn’s songs were once heard on stateside commercial rock radio. But as the decades have passed, the guy’s stature has seemed to diminish even as he’s remained active.

Rosenthal puts the blame in part on the lack of championing from tastemaker musicians. It’s an assertion that resonates as accurate. I’ll add that Cockburn’s never been a darling of critics the way that some purely instrumental fingerpickers and folky singer-songwriters were and are. And unlike the recordings of those more celebrated names (say, Fahey, Jansch, Hardin, Cooder), Cockburn’s stuff pre-Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws was pretty scarce in the bins new or used, at least in more suburban areas of the USA.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Miki Berenyi is best known as the lead singer, rhythm guitarist and founder member of UK band, Lush, who The New York Times note were “the brilliant, unsung underdogs of the ethereal pop wave that crashed through Britain in the late 1980s and early ’90s.” They reunited for a Coachella performance, tour and EP in 2016. Most recently, Berenyi has fronted the bands Piroshka and the Miki Berenyi Trio, who are set to perform in the US this May and June with Lol Tolhurst x Budgie supporting, and recently shared their cover of Lush’s “Light From A Dead Star.”

Today, Berenyi announces the North American release of her acclaimed autobiography, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success, out on April 9th via Mango Publishing as well as the global release of the audiobook via Bonnier Books. Originally published in the UK in 2022, the searingly honest and beautifully written memoir by the musician is an incredible account of a trailblazing woman and a seminal band delivered with the vivid, emotional power of an accomplished storyteller. Pre-order the book HERE.

From the bohemian lifestyle of her Hungarian father’s social circle to the privileged glamor of her Japanese mother’s acting career, Miki’s young life was a blur of international travel, celebrities and peripatetic schooling. Frequent relocation, parental neglect and the dark presence of her abusive Nazi grandmother resulted in crippling shyness, mental health problems and a vulnerability to exploitation. The route out was music —a passion shared by schoolmate Emma Anderson. The teenagers began attending gigs together and would go on to form Lush in 1988.

Talented and exuberant the band became hot property as they moved from pub gigs to Shoegaze icons and finally Britpop darlings. This uncompromising autobiography documents the excitement of playing live, the camaraderie of the gang, the thrill of signing to 4AD and the craziness of Lollapalooza.

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Remembering Marvin Gaye, born on this day in 1939. —Ed.

Since his tragic and premature death in 1984, Marvin Gaye’s discography has steadily risen in critical esteem, and particularly What’s Going On, his eleventh album and the enduring apex of the man’s posthumous ascension, as it’s landed atop at least one noted list of the Greatest Albums of All Time. And so, Motown/uMe has understandably endeavored with due diligence in marking the half century since that LP was originally released, their work culminating in a 50th Anniversary Edition on double vinyl, which adds six original mono single versions, plus four rare mixes of the title track, to the nine masterful selections that comprise the original album.

As fruitful as the 1960s were for Marvin Gaye, he didn’t really hit his stride until the first half of the following decade, with What’s Going On the record that began his run as a fully-formed, mature artist. It took until the second half of the ’60s for Gaye to really find his footing inside the Motown hit machine, and there was indeed a bunch of excellent singles and even a few classic LPs during that stretch, but with his second record of the ’70s, he began transcending the boundaries of the Motown framework.

Records like What’s Going On can be intimidating to engage with in print, mainly because they can inspire mere rephrasing of long-established observations, or to the other extreme, straining for a fresh perspective (which frequently ends up having little to do with the actual music). It’s been said that any truly great record is inexhaustible, and by that metric, there should always be something new to say about their individual qualities, but it’s just as true that many masterpieces are relatively straightforward in their brilliance.

It’s true that What’s Going On is something of a rarity in how it stylistically advances its genre while remaining pretty firmly inside the realms of pop. There’s nothing edgy about the music (a la Funkadelic), or uncompromising (like James Brown’s work of the period). Instead, Gaye favored sophisticated string arrangements that came to define soul at its most urbane in the first half of the ’70s (Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Gamble & Huff), and as the decade progressed, served as a primary building block in the emergence of pop-disco.

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Brothers Mark and Clive Ives have been making music since the early 1970s as the creative engine of the UK outfit Woo. Having released their debut in 1982, they collaborated with Independent Project Records later in the decade, and now, after a break of over 35 years, that relationship has been rekindled with Xylophonics + Robot X. Distinct but complementary, these two sets, initially assembled and issued in 2016–’17, are packaged together and given a physical release for the first time, available now on double vinyl (black or clear) and double compact disc, each exquisitely designed as is the IPR way.

As a significant portion of their early material has been reissued or given archival release in the 21st century by a variety of labels including Drag City, Emotional Rescue, and Palto Flats, Woo has been described as a cult band, a tag that fits as the Ives brothers’ work resists easy encapsulation. Additionally, Woo long persisted outside of the standard music industry mechanisms, with a high percentage of their recorded output initially self-released, a practice that has extended into our current digital reality.

Woo had been privately busy for roughly a decade before they put out Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong. Well received by the UK music press, that album was reissued by Bruce Licher’s Independent Project Records in 1988, with the label bringing out It’s Cozy Inside the next year. These initial releases inspired comparisons to kosmische, The Durutti Column, and Brian Eno, but as the ’90s progressed Woo had earned the New Age appellation, and fairly so, as much of their output was openly intended for relaxation, deep listening, healing, meditation, and therapy sessions.

After seeing widespread derision from the moment of its arrival (while being consumed in large quantities), New Age music has seen an upswing in esteem over the last few decades, and Woo’s work in this admittedly wide open territory (often just as easily assessed as ambient) belongs on the positive side of the style’s quality spectrum. But it’s clear straight off that Robot X stands outside the New Age genre while maintaining a few loose ties to the kosmische root.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | 50 years ago, the Grateful Dead were cooking with gas. It was spring 1974, the band had successfully emerged from a series of hectic, harrowing times, and would soon follow their transformative Wake Of The Flood with the second acclaimed album release on their very own Grateful Dead Records: From The Mars Hotel.

During the mere eight months that had passed between those two beloved LPs, the group also played some of their most exploratory live music and largest venues to date, famously amplified by the homemade, 75-ton Wall of Sound that they debuted on March 23rd, 1974, at their hometown Cow Palace in Daly City, CA. Eternal staples such as “Scarlet Begonias,” “Ship Of Fools,” and “U.S. Blues” would first be introduced into setlists along that season’s tour, before the Grateful Dead spent two months recording and honing them in the studio for From The Mars Hotel.

Not to mention perennial classics like “China Doll” and “Loose Lucy,” or “Pride of Cucamonga” and “Unbroken Chain”—the final two tracks Phil Lesh would sing on a Grateful Dead studio album. Now, as Grateful Dead members and tributaries continue to celebrate and bring so many of these formative songs to the masses, From The Mars Hotel has been remastered and expanded with newly unearthed material and rarities, in honor of its 50th Anniversary.

Out June 21st via Rhino, six days before the album’s original release on June 27, 1974, From The Mars Hotel (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) features remastered audio by GRAMMY® Award-winning engineer David Glasser, with Plangent Processes tape restoration and speed correction. Produced for release by Grateful Dead Legacy Manager and Audio Archivist, David Lemieux, the deluxe edition also includes demos of “China Doll” and “Wave That Flag”—the song that became “U.S. Blues”—as well as a previously unreleased live performance of the Grateful Dead at University of Nevada-Reno on 5/12/1974.

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Remembering Ronnie Lane, born on this day in 1946. —Ed.

Small Faces stand as one of the very finest groups of the 1960s, though many know them mainly for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, their most ambitious and final album before Steve Marriott’s departure effectively ended their diminutive phase. The scoop is that all of the Small Faces’ ‘60s records are worthy of ownership, even the mercantile odds-and-ends collection From the Beginning. That disc and its self-titled predecessor are currently available as 180gm replica LPs. Are they cut to lacquer from the original quarter-inch production masters with front-laminated sleeves? Why yes indeed.

One gauge of the true greats is that the music manages to get better, or at least maintains a high standard of quality, as the discs take their place in the racks. So it is with the Small Faces. With this said the Decca period offers distinct and enduring appeal; more so than The Who, the Small Faces circa-’65-’66 are the true ambassadors of Mod. Utterly Brit in orientation, it wasn’t until the fourth LP that the group entered the US market.

The Small Faces consisted of Steve Marriott on vocals, guitar and harmonica, Ronnie Lane on bass, Kenney Jones on drums and percussion, and initially Jimmy Winston on keyboards. Upon signing to Decca through the efforts of manager Don Arden, they released two singles in ’65. The first “What’cha Gonna Do about It” charted, hitting #14, while the second “I’ve Got Mine” didn’t. Shortly thereafter, Winston was replaced by Ian McLagan, the new keyboardist assisting 3rd 45 “Sha-La-La-La-Lee” in reaching the #3 spot. A full-length followed a few months later.

Sporting the brass to open with “Shake” in Sam Cooke’s tempo, ’66’s Small Faces starts out strong and never really falters, which is impressive for a debut comprised roughly equally, as was the norm of the time, of originals and borrowed/cover material. Neither tentative nor betraying instrumental greenness, the Small Faces were also unburdened by conflict over what they wanted to be.

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Bob Seger was thirty and practically a geriatric (thirty is sixty in rock years!) when 1976’s Night Moves finally took him nationwide, big time. It came as a surprise. Seger seemed destined to spend his career as a journeyman—a big fish (although hardly as hip a fish as The Stooges, the MC5 and Alice Cooper) in the Detroit area, just another band everywhere else. He was a second-tier rocker who put on high-energy rock shows and had written some great songs including the 1968 classic “2 +2 = ?”and 1975’s “Beautiful Loser,” none of which—with the exception of 1968’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”—broke into the American Top Forty.

He began his recording career with the Bob Seger System before going solo and then forming the crack Detroit unit Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, but fame eluded him until Night Moves (with its title track, which may well be the greatest and most poignant song ever written about growing old and looking back) went to No. four on the charts. It says everything you need to know about Seger’s genius that “Night Moves” sounds like the work of a much older man—thirty is a bit early to be singing about autumn closing in. But Seger pulled it off with ease, perhaps because all that touring left him wise beyond his years.

Night Moves broke Seger, but he made his first inroad towards national attention with the previous year’s two-fer Live Bullet with The Silver Bullet Band. Recorded at Detroit’s Cobo Hall before a vocal and partisan crowd, Live Bullet is a galvanizing non-stop hard rock party and call to arms. Live Bullet demonstrates that Seger was a no-frills roots rocker with a voice that was all road grit who put on an electrifying live show, heavy on irresistible, high-octane, old-school scorchers that should have made him a star but didn’t. And the covers (of songs by Tina Turner, Van Morrison, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry) are barnstormers as well. When the announcer at album’s open shouts, “You are here because you want the real thing!” he isn’t fooling.

Seger projects almost as well as John Fogarty—he may have been in Cobo Hall, but I’ll bet you the kids could hear him giving it his all in North Dakota’s Iron Range. And Seger and band seemed to have a constitutional aversion to going the ballad/love song route or even going the speed limit; aside from “Turn the Page” and “Jody Girl,” the adrenaline never flags. Simple, loud and fast: it’s the oldest formula there is, but there’s a reason Seger would go on to sing about loving that old time rock and roll—he loved that old time rock and roll. It’s an awful song, granted, and a real blot on his permanent record, but a true reflection of his Chuck Berry-loving self.

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