October 22nd
album anniversaries

Two sets of musicians share Night Moves. Bob Seger made most of the album with the Silver Bullet Band in Detroit, a group that included guitarist Drew Abbott and drummer Charlie Allen Martin, while four songs were cut in Alabama with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

“Rock and Roll Never Forgets” opens the record, and “Sunspot Baby” starts the second side. “Mainstreet” and the title song both became top thirty singles. The album followed Live Bullet, which had climbed to number 34, and reached number eight on the Billboard 200, Seger’s first top ten album.

Blue Moves was the first album Elton John released on his own Rocket label, and like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road it ran to four sides. Gus Dudgeon produced it, with Paul Buckmaster and James Newton Howard sharing the orchestrations; Newton Howard handled “Tonight”.

Bernie Taupin’s lyrics run from “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”, the first single, to the closing “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!)”, which leans towards disco. “Crazy Water” was also released as a single. The double album reached number three in both Britain and the United States.

“A short film by Kendrick Lamar”, reads the cover, and the album follows that idea through a story of his teenage years in Compton. It was his first major-label record, released through Top Dawg, Aftermath and Interscope, with Dr. Dre as executive producer.

“Compton”, featuring Dr. Dre, was the first song recorded and now closes the sequence. Along the way come “Backseat Freestyle”, “Poetic Justice” with Drake and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”. “Swimming Pools (Drank)” was a single before release, and the album entered the Billboard 200 at number two with 242,000 copies.

Joe Brazil, a Seattle saxophonist and educator, taped John Coltrane’s band at the Penthouse club on 2 October 1965, the final night of a week-long run. The reels stayed in his private collection until after his death, and Impulse! issued this performance of A Love Supreme from them in 2021.

The quartet of Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones is expanded by Pharoah Sanders, a second bassist in Donald Garrett, and Carlos Ward sitting in. The four parts, from “Acknowledgement” to “Psalm”, are separated by interludes, and the whole set runs to about 75 minutes.

Blue Banisters was first promised for 4 July 2021, then pushed back to the autumn. Lana Del Rey had already shared three of its songs in May: the title track, “Text Book” and “Wildflower Wildfire”.

“Arcadia”, which she wrote and produced with Drew Erickson, followed as a single in September. The recording dates reach back to 2013 and forward to 2021, and the fifteen tracks credit producers including Gabe Simon, Zachary Dawes and Rick Nowels. The sequence opens with “Text Book” and ends on “Sweet Carolina”.

Long improvised jams, some stretching to forty minutes, were the raw material for Sympathy for Life. Parquet Courts recorded in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, cut those sessions down into songs and kept only the work done with producers Rodaidh McDonald and John Parish.

Most of the album was finished before the pandemic. The exception is “Marathon of Anger”, written and recorded during the protests of June 2020. “Walking at a Downtown Pace” was the first single, with “Plant Life” and “Black Widow Spider” following before Rough Trade issued the full record.