New Releases
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September 23, 2022In These Times, the new album by percussionist, producer, and composer Makaya McCraven, has been in process since 2015. It’s the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records, an appropriately career-defining body of work. The eleven-song suite was created over seven-plus years, as McCraven strived to fuse odd-meter compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large-ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” he’s honed over the years. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators—including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill—In These Times highlights McCraven’s unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders, and blending past, present, and future into poly-textural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st-century folk music.
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k.d. lang and producer Tracy Young's “Constant Craving (Fashionably Late Remix)” is the first-ever official remix of lang’s 1993 Grammy-winning hit. It follows the May 2021 release of makeover, a new collection of classic dance remixes from the era. "When ‘Constant Craving’ was the single, my team wanted to do a remix of it, and I was feeling protective and said ‘No, I don’t want to touch it," lang recalls. "When we were putting together makeover, we realized we didn’t have a ‘Constant Craving’ remix! And that was why.” Young says: “The song continues to resonate through generations, and it speaks about the struggles of life and the resiliency of the human spirit—an inspirational message that is so needed right now."
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Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers' Ramble in Music City: The Lost Concert, features the 1990 Nashville debut of the acoustic all-star group—Sam Bush, Roy Huskey Jr., Larry Atamanuik, Al Perkins, Jon Randall Stewart—at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. The concert was recorded and shelved until now, when, more than 30 years later, it has been unearthed to be released for the first time. The set features entirely different songs from the band's acclaimed live album At the Ryman, with music by A.P. Carter, Rodney Crowell, Ruth Franks, the Louvin Brothers, Doc Pomus, Paul Simon, Townes Van Zandt, and Harris herself.
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On this two-track single, saxophonist Sam Gendel interprets two jazz standards—Duke Ellington's "Isfahan" and Cal Massey‘s “My Little Suede Shoes,” a song popularized by Charlie Parker—in the manner of sonic construction / deconstruction on his 2020 Nonesuch debut album, Satin Doll, with Gabe Noel on electric bass and Philippe Melanson on electronic percussion.
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Randy Newman’s eight-LP box set Roll with the Punches: The Studio Albums (1979–2017) was first released for Records Store Day's RSD Drop in July 2021. It comprises his latest seven studio albums—Born Again, Trouble in Paradise, Land of Dreams, Faust, Bad Love (on vinyl for the first time), Harps and Angels, and Dark Matter—on 140-gram vinyl, featuring original album jackets, lyric/credit sheets, and Faust demos.
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In the winter of 2016, Conor Oberst found himself hibernating in his hometown of Omaha after living in New York City for more than a decade. He emerged with the unexpectedly raw, unadorned solo album Ruminations. The results are almost sketch-like in their sparseness: Oberst alone with his guitar, piano, and harmonica. The 2021 Ruminations (Expanded Edition) includes five bonus tracks, four of which are previously unreleased. The vinyl, pressed on two 140-gram LPs, includes an exclusive etching on side D.