For the Record
Dawes - Good Luck With Whatever
Good Luck With Whatever is Dawes at their most unapologetic. It's sympathetic, magnetic, genetic, highly kinetic. Songs like "Didn't Fix Me" & "Me Especially" showcase Goldsmith's poetic prowess. An unfiltered photograph of a band doing what they do best, these guys learned to rock before they could crawl. Produced by 6X Grammy winner Dave Cobb.
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory
50th anniversary pressing of iconic studio album from America's greatest rock and roll band; first released in 1970 at the peak of Creedence's prolific career. Includes the hits "Who'll Stop The Rain," "Run Though the Jungle," "Up Around The Bend," "Looking Out My Back Door" and more, plus a cover of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine."
Ceelo Green - Ceelo Green is Thomas Callaway
The sixth solo studio album by Ceelo Green. The album was produced by Dan Auerbach and recorded at his Easy Eye Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. The title imparts an intent to humanize an artist whose outsized persona, displayed boldly as ever in 2020 on the British version of The Masked Singer, has sometimes overshadowed his music.
Bright Eyes - Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was
Sometimes it feels like you hear a Bright Eyes song with your whole body. From Conor Oberst's early recordings in an Omaha basement in 1995 all the way up to 2020, Bright Eyes' music tries to unravel the impossible tangles of dissent: personal and political, external and internal. It's a study of the beauty in unsteadiness in all it's forms - in a voice, beliefs, love, identity, and what fills up the spaces in-between. And in so many ways, it's just about searching for a way through. The year 2020 is full of significant anniversaries for Bright Eyes. Fevers and Mirrors was released 20 years ago this May, while Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I'm Wide Awake It's Morning both turned 15 in January. The latter, a singer-songwriter tour-de-force released amidst the Bush presidency and Iraq war, wades through incisive anti-war rhetoric and micro, intimate calamities. On the title track and throughout the record, Oberst sings about body counts in the newspaper, televised wars, the bottomless pit of American greed, struggling to understand the world alongside one's own turmoil. In it's own way, I'm Wide Awake It's Morning carved out it's place in the canon of great anti-war albums by being both present and prophetic, it's urgency enduring 15 years later. In 2011 the release of The People's Key, Bright Eyes' ninth and most recent album, ushered in an unofficial hiatus for the beloved project. In the time since, the work of the band's core members - Oberst, multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis, and multi-instrumentalist Nathaniel Walcott - has remained omnipresent, through both the members' original work and collaboration. In recent years, Mogis produced records for beloved folk acts First Aid Kit and Joseph, among others, as well as mixed the fine-spun ennui of Phoebe Bridgers' breakthrough 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps. Mogis and bandmate Walcott also teamed up to write the original scores for The Fault in Our Stars, Stuck in Love, and Lovely Still, and Walcott worked as a solo composer scoring number of independent feature-length films. Walcott spent extensive time on collaboration; in addition to his arrangement work for Mavis Staples, First Aid Kit, and M. Ward, he contributed studio work to artists ranging from U2 to jazz guitarist Jeff Parker, and also toured heavily as a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Oberst, who's nearly 30 years into a prolific musical career, spent the last decade in similarly productive fashion. Across three years he released a string of solo albums: Salutations (2017), Ruminations (2016), and Upside Down Mountain (2014), as well as guested on records by First Aid Kit, Phoebe Bridgers, and Alt-J. His punk band, Desaparecidos, emerged from a 13-year hiatus in 2015 with the thunderous sophomore LP, Payola, a white-knuckled disarray of hollered political fury. And at the top of 2019, Oberst and Bridgers debuted their new band, Better Oblivion Community Center, digitally dropping the critically-lauded eponymous debut LP alongside a surprise performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The heart at Bright Eyes' songwriting still looms culturally, in films and TV shows and through re-imaginings by other artists. Mac Miller covered both "Lua" and "First Day of My Life"; Lorde's version of the penultimate The People's Key track, the funereal-waltz "Ladder Song," was a focal point of The Hunger Games' soundtrack; The Killers covered "Four Winds" for their Spaceman EP; and Lil Peep's "Worlds Away" samples "Something Vague" while Young Thug's "Me Or Us" samples "First Day of My Life." Bright Eyes' expansive catalog has traversed genre, sound, and countless players; unpolished demos or fuzzy folk, electrified rock or country twang. The sharp songwriting and musicianship is all anchored in Bright Eyes' singular ability to flip deep intimacy into something universal. For so many, for so long, listening to Bright Eyes has been like hearing yourself in someone else's song - a moment of understanding or illumination, knowing you're on the same team looking for a way to move through of all this shit. And while 2020 is a year of milestones for the band, it's also the year Bright Eyes returns, newly signed to indie label Dead Oceans. Amidst the current overwhelming uncertainty and upheaval of global and personal worlds, Oberst, Mogis, and Walcott reunited under the moniker as both an escape from, and a confrontation of, trying times. Getting the band back together felt right, and necessary, and the friendship at the core of the band has been a longtime pillar of Bright Eyes' output. For Bright Eyes, this long-awaited re-emergence feels like coming home.
Ruston Kelly - Shape & Destroy
With his sophomore album Shape & Destroy, Nashville-based artist Ruston Kelly now documents his experience in maintaining sobriety, and finally facing the demons that led him to drug abuse in the first place. But while Kelly recounts that journey with an unvarnished honesty, his grace and conviction as an artist ultimately turn Shape & Destroy into a work of unlikely transcendence.
Collective Soul - Collective Soul
Collective Soul’s triple-platinum sophomore album will be commemorated with its first-ever vinyl pressing. Craft Recordings announces a 25th anniversary reissue of Collective Soul’s acclaimed self-titled sophomore album. Affectionately referred to as “The Blue Album”, Collective Soul followed the band’s hit 1993 debut, Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid, and would go on to become the highest-selling title of their career.
Booker T. Jones - Time Is Tight (Orange)
In an emotional musical journey, Booker T explores new takes on the songs that make up the fabric of his musical identity. Largely mirroring the chapter titles from his forthcoming memoir Time is Tight, the album titled Note by Note serves as a musical companion. Stax staples like Cause I Love You and These Arms of Mine are woven into defining musical moments from Booker's journey after STAX, when he produced and recorded with artists as diverse as Willie Nelson and Carlos Santana. Booker T & the M.G.'s fans will enjoy a new ending to the song Time is Tight, a Romanesque coda that has been played live yet never recorded. The album culminates with new original music, highlighting the soaring guitar and vocals of Booker's son and collaborator Teddy Jones. Booker T is a 4 time Grammy Award winner (including the Lifetime Achievement Award), Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, and arguably the most famous Hammond B3 player in history.
Mondo Cozmo - New Medicine
Mondo Cozmo does not regret putting his fist through that window while crafting his second full-length and first release for Last Gang Records, but the four-hour surgery did suck. Yet, breaking the glass smashed a figurative ceiling. In the aftermath, he learned how to "Say no," departed amicably from the major label system, "taped a f#cking pick to his cast" in order to play guitar, lost feeling in the aforementioned hand for two years, and wrote the rock 'n' roll record he always meant to write. The most rock 'n' roll thing about it isn't the right hook, the guitars, or even the attitude. It's the moment of self-actualization by the Philadelphia-born and Los Angeles-based critically acclaimed alternative troubadour and gutter punk poet.