Songs in the Key of Life was Stevie Wonder's longest, most ambitious collection of songs, a two-LP (plus accompanying EP) set that -- just as the title promised -- touched on nearly every issue under the sun, and did it all with ambitious (even for him), wide-ranging arrangements and some of the best performances of Wonder's career. The opening "Love's in Need of Love Today" and "Have a Talk with God" are curiously subdued, but Stevie soon kicks into gear with "Village Ghetto Land," a fierce exposé of ghetto neglect set to a satirical Baroque synthesizer. Hot on its heels comes the torrid fusion jam "Contusion," a big, brassy hit tribute to the recently departed Duke Ellington in "Sir Duke," and (another hit, this one a Grammy winner as well) the bumping poem to his childhood, "I Wish." Though they didn't necessarily appear in order, Songs in the Key of Life contains nearly a full album on love and relationships, along with another full album on issues social and spiritual. Fans of the love album Talking Book can marvel that he sets the bar even higher here, with brilliant material like the tenderly cathartic and gloriously redemptive "Joy Inside My Tears," the two-part, smooth-and-rough "Ordinary Pain," the bitterly ironic "All Day Sucker," or another classic heartbreaker, "Summer Soft." Those inclined toward Stevie Wonder the social-issues artist had quite a few songs to focus on as well: "Black Man" was a Bicentennial school lesson on remembering the vastly different people who helped build America; "Pastime Paradise" examined the plight of those who live in the past and have little hope for the future; "Village Ghetto Land" brought listeners to a nightmare of urban wasteland; and "Saturn" found Stevie questioning his kinship with the rest of humanity and amusingly imagining paradise as a residency on a distant planet. If all this sounds overwhelming, it is; Stevie Wonder had talent to spare during the mid-'70s, and instead of letting the reserve trickle out during the rest of the decade, he let it all go with one massive burst. (His only subsequent record of the '70s was the similarly gargantuan but largely instrumental soundtrack Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.)© John Bush /TiVo

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I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got became Sinéad O'Connor's popular breakthrough on the strength of the stunning Prince cover "Nothing Compares 2 U," which topped the pop charts for a month. But even its remarkable intimacy wasn't adequate preparation for the harrowing confessionals that composed the majority of the album. Informed by her stormy relationship with drummer John Reynolds, who fathered O'Connor's first child before the couple broke up, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got lays the singer's psyche startlingly and sometimes uncomfortably bare. The songs mostly address relationships with parents, children, and (especially) lovers, through which O'Connor weaves a stubborn refusal to be defined by anyone but herself. In fact, the album is almost too personal and cathartic to draw the listener in close, since O'Connor projects such turmoil and offers such specific detail. Her confrontational openness makes it easy to overlook O'Connor's musical versatility. Granted, not all of the music is as brilliantly audacious as "I Am Stretched on Your Grave," which marries a Frank O'Connor poem to eerie Celtic melodies and a James Brown "Funky Drummer" sample. But the album plays like a tour de force in its demonstration of everything O'Connor can do: dramatic orchestral ballads, intimate confessionals, catchy pop/rock, driving guitar rock, and protest folk, not to mention the nearly six-minute a cappella title track. What's consistent throughout is the frighteningly strong emotion O'Connor brings to bear on the material, while remaining sensitive to each piece's individual demands. Aside from being a brilliant album in its own right, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got foreshadowed the rise of deeply introspective female singer/songwriters like Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan, who were more traditionally feminine and connected with a wider audience. Which takes nothing away from anyone; if anything, it's evidence that, when on top of her game, O'Connor was a singular talent.© Steve Huey /TiVo

Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger perhaps is the strangest blockbuster country produced, a concept album about a preacher on the run after murdering his departed wife and her new lover, told entirely with brief song-poems and utterly minimal backing. It's defiantly anticommercial and it demands intense concentration -- all reasons why nobody thought it would be a hit, a story related in Chet Flippo's liner notes to the 2000 reissue. It was a phenomenal blockbuster, though, selling millions of copies, establishing Nelson as a superstar recording artist in its own right. For all its success, it still remains a prickly, difficult album, though, making the interspersed concept of Phases and Stages sound shiny in comparison. It's difficult because it's old-fashioned, sounding like a tale told around a cowboy campfire. Now, this all reads well on paper, and there's much to admire in Nelson's intimate gamble, but it's really elusive, as the themes get a little muddled and the tunes themselves are a bit bare. It's undoubtedly distinctive -- and it sounds more distinctive with each passing year -- but it's strictly an intellectual triumph and, after a pair of albums that were musically and intellectually sound, it's a bit of a letdown, no matter how successful it was.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Bob Dylan returned from exile with John Wesley Harding, a quiet, country-tinged album that split dramatically from his previous three. A calm, reflective album, John Wesley Harding strips away all of the wilder tendencies of Dylan's rock albums -- even the then-unreleased Basement Tapes he made the previous year -- but it isn't a return to his folk roots. If anything, the album is his first serious foray into country, but only a handful of songs, such as "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," are straight country songs. Instead, John Wesley Harding is informed by the rustic sound of country, as well as many rural myths, with seemingly simple songs like "All Along the Watchtower," "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," and "The Wicked Messenger" revealing several layers of meaning with repeated plays. Although the lyrics are somewhat enigmatic, the music is simple, direct, and melodic, providing a touchstone for the country-rock revolution that swept through rock in the late '60s.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

With the third of four installments of Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks' multimedia project I Am The Moon, any narrative thread among the albums has dissipated. How a tune like "Yes We Will," which seems to be about global warming, ("Oh, our planet is changing fast/ And the way things are going it just won't last/ Times are gonna get real hard") fits into a some vague narrative based on Nizami's epic 12th century love poem Layla and Majnun may only be apparent to the husband and wife principals of the Tedeschi Trucks Band. But then, the supposed inspiration for what the band calls a "portrait of passion, despair and hard-won revelation in American-music technicolor'' is itself a varied poem that features desert battles, roving packs of animals, smugglers and a narrator—Nizami—who extols the spiritual virtues of imbibing.  In other words, almost any song on any topic could work in this "story." It must be remembered that these collections of songs are the soundtrack to previously released films. But whatever the motivations, this is again six songs of Tedeschi Trucks doing what they do best—blues rock highlighted by Trucks' slide guitar and Tedeschi's strong vocals. "Yes We Will" is the kind of straight-ahead electric blues number that's tailor made for Tedeschi to sing. What's most interesting about I Am The Moon III. The Fall is that two other members of the band get a chance to hold forth. In the New Orleans second line-flavored "Gravity," singer/keyboard player Gabe Dixon makes a strong case for powerful women as he sings "She doesn't give you everything you want/ 'Cause she knows a man/ She'll give you all you don't know you need," before Trucks' slide guitar slashes away into a solo. Mike Mattison also gives an impassioned vocal turn as he repeats the title in the waltz, "Emmaline." With horn charts and ardent vocal support from Mark Rivers the rousing gospel ballad closer "Take Me As I Am," is a perfect setting for Tedeschi's heartfelt plea. While the focus on solving the riddle of "Are we really in the end, just in love with the dream of love?" seems to have slipped away, this is still the Tedeschi Trucks Band with a mountain of quality material and the talents to play it all well. © Robert Baird/Qobuz  

After spending over a decade avoiding his past, Chris Cornell reconnected with it in a big way during 2010. First, he reunited with Soundgarden, their tour so successful it spilled over into a studio collaboration interrupted by Cornell launching an acoustic tour where he revisited his catalog, quite definitively tying his solo career and time with Audioslave to Soundgarden. Songbook is a live album culled from this tour and has Cornell sampling from all phases of his career, often spinning harder-rocking songs into moody reflective territory. Unlike his solo debut, Euphoria Morning, this never sounds solipsistic; Cornell is engaged, looking outward to the audience, giving subtly forceful performances that often rescue overlooked tunes -- including selections from his electronica makeover Scream -- and freshen up familiar songs, including covers of Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” He sounds at peace with his past and comfortable with his present, and that casual assurance makes Songbook his best solo offering to date.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

In the year of his 90th birthday (which he would have celebrated on the 23rd of September 2020 had he not died in 2004), Ray Charles is honoured with a new 90-track compilation box set. Just another compilation like all the rest? Yes and no. Ray Charles is undoubtedly one of the most-compiled artists in the history of music. Published by Tangerine, the label that the musician set up at the end of the 50s to keep the rights to his songs, this box set starts out like all the others: with the post-Atlantic hits, Georgia On My Mind, Hit The Road Jack, One Mint Julep, Busted... These are timeless treasures of proto-soul, but there doesn't seem to be much novelty here. The rest is much more interesting, and much rarer: tracks recorded between the second half of the 1960s and the 2000s, many of which were only released on vinyl, never reissued on CD and until now unavailable on digital. This is the first time that Ray Charles' lesser-known years have been given the compilation treatment in this way, and it is a revelation. In the 90s and 2000s, the production of his songs had a synthetic feel, and they did not age too well. These rarer songs are often hidden gems of southern soul, flavoured with country and wrapped in sumptuous symphonic orchestrations. Whether he is singing the Muppets (It's Ain't Easy Being Green) or Gershwin (Summertime, a duet with Cleo Laine), Ray Charles is always deeply moving. Now, the dream is to hear reissues of all these albums in their entirety. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz

Where Crowded House's previous album, Temple of Low Men, showcased the often dark side of a man alone with his thoughts, Woodface represents the joy of reunion and the freedom of a collaborative effort -- more than half of the album was originally conceived as a Finn Brothers project, which was Tim and Neil's first crack at writing together. The songs are easily their finest to date, combining flawless melodies and the outstanding harmonies of the brothers' perfectly matched voices.© Chris Woodstra /TiVo

Songs in the Key of Life was Stevie Wonder's longest, most ambitious collection of songs, a two-LP (plus accompanying EP) set that -- just as the title promised -- touched on nearly every issue under the sun, and did it all with ambitious (even for him), wide-ranging arrangements and some of the best performances of Wonder's career. The opening "Love's in Need of Love Today" and "Have a Talk with God" are curiously subdued, but Stevie soon kicks into gear with "Village Ghetto Land," a fierce exposé of ghetto neglect set to a satirical Baroque synthesizer. Hot on its heels comes the torrid fusion jam "Contusion," a big, brassy hit tribute to the recently departed Duke Ellington in "Sir Duke," and (another hit, this one a Grammy winner as well) the bumping poem to his childhood, "I Wish." Though they didn't necessarily appear in order, Songs in the Key of Life contains nearly a full album on love and relationships, along with another full album on issues social and spiritual. Fans of the love album Talking Book can marvel that he sets the bar even higher here, with brilliant material like the tenderly cathartic and gloriously redemptive "Joy Inside My Tears," the two-part, smooth-and-rough "Ordinary Pain," the bitterly ironic "All Day Sucker," or another classic heartbreaker, "Summer Soft." Those inclined toward Stevie Wonder the social-issues artist had quite a few songs to focus on as well: "Black Man" was a Bicentennial school lesson on remembering the vastly different people who helped build America; "Pastime Paradise" examined the plight of those who live in the past and have little hope for the future; "Village Ghetto Land" brought listeners to a nightmare of urban wasteland; and "Saturn" found Stevie questioning his kinship with the rest of humanity and amusingly imagining paradise as a residency on a distant planet. If all this sounds overwhelming, it is; Stevie Wonder had talent to spare during the mid-'70s, and instead of letting the reserve trickle out during the rest of the decade, he let it all go with one massive burst. (His only subsequent record of the '70s was the similarly gargantuan but largely instrumental soundtrack Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.)© John Bush /TiVo

Walter Trout pays tribute to blues icon Luther Allison on his 23rd solo release Luther's Blues. 12 of the 13 tracks on the CD are associated with Allison except for the Trout original, "When Luther Played the Blues." Trout first met Luther in Switzerland at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1986, which provided the location shot for the CD cover. Trout maintains he had the idea for this album since that first meeting. The songs Trout chose to cover are taken from Allison's albums Songs from the Road, Bad Love, Blue Streak, Reckless, and Soul Fixin' Man. As usual, Trout's guitar dexterity is undisputed, but his top-notch vocal work deserves equal attention, especially on the heart-wrenching tracks "Freedom," and "Pain in the Streets." In an era where blues tribute albums are abundant, and in some cases the tribute is anything but, Luther's Blues rises to the top with the best of them.© Al Campbell /TiVo

No one was looking to Justin Bieber for a ruminative and nuanced view on race relations, but the singer made some choices here that aren't merely ineffectual. They're foolish. The voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. is twice used on this album that otherwise has nothing to do with justice. It's first used as the intro to an airy love ballad containing standard fawning Bieber-isms like "Two seconds without you's like two months, and that's too much." A lengthier segment from one of King's statements on civil disobedience leads to a song of devotion that seems to have been written after hours spent watching clips of early MTV (coincidentally when the channel's play list was zero-percent Black). To wit, just as King was willing to sacrifice his life for equality, Bieber is willing to walk through flames for a kiss that could kill. Disregarding the inapt title and interludes, Justice is a decent addition to Bieber's catalog. It's distinguished by a variety of pop modes that includes vaporous synth rock and strumming acoustic ballads, hip-hop gospel and bedroom EDM, and sun-dazed R&B and contemporary Afrobeat, each one with astutely selected producers and featured artists. The Chance the Rapper collaboration "Holy," restrained ballads "Lonely" and "Anyone," and the tear-jerking empath anthem "Hold On" were all hits before the album was released. Altogether, they accurately forecasted the record's lack of Kidz Bop-friendly pop trifles and TikTok takeover bids, that there would be no retreads of "Sorry" or "Yummy." The upshot is that Justice is one of Bieber's steadiest releases, among the easiest to play from start to finish. The only overdone aspect is the low self-esteem and unworthiness the lyrics either suggest or flatly express in almost every song.© Andy Kellman /TiVo