October 23rd
album anniversaries

Wayne Shorter wrote four of the seven pieces on Sorcerer, among them “Prince of Darkness” and “Masqualero”. The quintet of Miles Davis, Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams recorded most of the album in May 1967 at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, with Teo Macero producing.

Hancock’s “The Sorcerer” supplies the title, a nickname he had for Davis, and Williams’s “Pee Wee” is played without the trumpeter. The closing “Nothing Like You” comes from a 1962 session, with Bob Dorough singing and Gil Evans arranging. Cicely Tyson appears on the cover.

Sessions for Seventh Sojourn began in January 1972 at Beckthorns, Mike Pinder’s home studio, before moving to Decca’s Studio 4 in north London for most of the year. Tony Clarke produced the eight songs, which are shared among the band’s writers.

John Lodge’s “Isn’t Life Strange” had been released as a single that spring, and his “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)” closes the album. Pinder’s “Lost in a Lost World” opens it. In the United States the record went to number one on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for five weeks at the end of 1972.

Twelve country songs by other writers make up Almost Blue, recorded at CBS Studio A in Nashville during May 1981 with Billy Sherrill producing. Elvis Costello and the Attractions took material from Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Charlie Rich and Gram Parsons, among others.

Hank Williams’s “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)” opens the record, and Gram Parsons, a co-writer of “I’m Your Toy”, is represented twice. “Good Year for the Roses” became a number six single in Britain, with “Sweet Dreams” following it in December. The album reached number seven on the UK chart.

Thom Yorke sings with PJ Harvey on “This Mess We’re In” and adds his voice to “One Line” and “Beautiful Feeling”. The album was recorded in the spring of 2000 at Great Linford Manor in Milton Keynes, with Harvey co-producing alongside Mick Harvey and Rob Ellis.

“Big Exit” opens the sequence, and “Good Fortune”, “A Place Called Home” and “This Is Love” were all issued as singles. The record won the 2001 Mercury Prize; Harvey accepted by telephone from Washington, D.C., and became the first female solo artist to take the award.

Apart from a makeshift choir, Matthew Houck played every instrument on Pride himself. The third Phosphorescent album and the first on Dead Oceans, it was made during a move, with Houck leaving Athens, Georgia, for Brooklyn partway through.

The eight songs open with “A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise” and end on the title track. The album’s own notes describe a darker, more restrained set than his earlier records, with “At Death, A Proclamation” among its few outbursts. “Wolves” was later used in the 2011 film Margin Call.

A one-room cabin in Westhampton, Massachusetts, was where Adrianne Lenker spent April and May 2020 recording these two companion albums with engineer Philip Weinrobe. They worked to tape on an eight-track machine and let the sounds of rain, wind, birds and a wood stove into the recordings.

Songs gathers eleven pieces, opening with “Two Reverse” and including the singles “Anything” and “Dragon Eyes”. Instrumentals holds two long pieces, “Music for Indigo” and “Mostly Chimes”, built from guitar improvisation with recorded chimes and birdsong. 4AD released the pair together.