VIA PRESS RELEASE | A&M/UMe celebrates the upcoming holidays in a merry big way with the release of the Carpenters’ Christmas Once More, an all-new Christmas collection featuring 16 timeless Carpenters holiday classics personally curated by Richard Carpenter.

This newly remixed and remastered 16-track set includes perennial Carpenters holiday favorites such as “Sleigh Ride,” “(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays,” Richard’s own “Merry Christmas, Darling” featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and many more. All 16 tracks, which have been culled from the Carpenters’ most cherished holiday albums, are available now in multiple formats, including CD, black vinyl, limited-edition gold vinyl, digital download, streaming, and ATMOS. Listen to or order Carpenters’ Christmas Once More HERE.

Building upon the grand traditions of Christmas songs and holiday-themed albums recorded by legendary artists like Enrico Caruso (“O Holy Night”), Bessie Smith (“At the Christmas Ball”), Bing Crosby (“White Christmas”), Perry Como (“Home for the Holidays”), and Frank Sinatra (Christmas Songs By Sinatra), Karen and Richard Carpenter set out to make their own first seasonal LP in 1978 titled Christmas Portrait. Richard had a unique idea for creating a near-continuous work that would mix hymns, pop tunes, vocals, and instrumentals into a more flowing, inventive medley style.

In effect, the Carpenters came up with a modernized sound tapestry in which old and new traditions followed one another in surprising and pleasing ways. Their concept of making Christmas albums artfully reflected the eclectic ways American audiences experienced the season and its joyful music in the years when the Carpenters’ generation was growing up.

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Celebrating Rickie Lee Jones on her 70th birthday. —Ed.

I’ve always had the same issue with Rickie Lee Jones as I do with Tom Waits; to wit, I can’t escape the sense that they’re beatniks escaped from a time capsule. There’s something atavistic about their sound; hearing it, it’s impossible to escape the eerie sensation that you’re sitting in a smoky and low-ceilinged Village club, the Kettle of Fish say, surrounded by beret-wearing hipsters in goatees, of the type who click their fingers instead of applaud.

That said, I’ve always preferred Jones, if only because she doesn’t have a patch of hair sprouting from her lower lip. No, the truth is I can’t really rationalize my life-long dislike of Waits; sure, he’s written lots of great songs, but that doesn’t mean I have to like him. I don’t have to like Jones either, but I do, from her groundbreaking debut to her latest release, 2012’s The Devil You Know, on which she sings like… well, like she just swallowed a shitload of ludes, which causes her to sing very slooowwwllly, which I like a lot. No more of the beatnik affectations. Her phrasing and sudden shifts in tone are idiosyncratic, to say the least, but she doesn’t sound as rebop as she does wasted, like she brought a quart of bourbon to the studio and drank it before she sang any of the songs on this album of noteworthy standards.

Jones’ career took off with the release of her 1979 self-titled debut, which featured dozens of top-notch LA sessions players—to say nothing of Dr. John on piano and Randy Newman on synthesizers—and included the great “Chuck E.’s in Love.” Buoyed by a highly touted performance on Saturday Night Live, she soon found herself on the cover of the Rolling Stone, and her beret quickly became more famous than Joni Mitchell’s beret, which no doubt pissed off Mitchell’s beret to no end.

And she would likely have become a superstar had she not drifted inexorably jazzwards, a move that she found creatively fulfilling but didn’t win her many pop fans. Henceforth she toiled in the jazz-pop wilderness, moving to Europe where she battled with writer’s block. But she continued to record, moving from more mainstream projects to more avant-garde efforts, none of them wildly successful but most of them critically praised.

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I don’t know when you first found out about the role of a session musician, but for me, it was associated with The Monkees. I remember not quite understanding how a band could make music, yet still not play all of the instruments on the record. Well, my youthful naïveté was obliterated when I learned that there exists a highly skilled, dedicated, professional group of elite musicians who slip in the studio to lay down tracks that uplift whatever the star performer may have created.

On keyboards, there’s one session musician who stands above many others: he’s played extensively with The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and even The Beatles. Not only did he share that rarefied air with those heavyweight champs of classic rock, but his keyboard parts were sometimes integral to the artistic and commercial success of the song. You’ve heard the wild electric piano solo on The Beatles’ “Revolution,” you know that haltingly beautiful piano part in The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” and you’re familiar with the majestic grandeur of the piano part that supports Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.”

So when you learn about a musician such as Nicky Hopkins, who’s reputation may be a bit unsung, what are you to do? Well, if you’re a filmmaker like Mike Treen, you make a documentary about him. And you gather as many first hand witnesses to Nicky’s expertise as possible, including Peter Frampton, Dave Davies, and even Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.

Mike Treen joins me to talk about his film titled The Session Man. We explore how he pieced together different elements from Hopkins’s life and presented it in a cogent and easy to follow narrative that showcases the ups and downs of this special musician’s life.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

Riley Puckett became the poster child of weird old American country music when Nick Tosches plastered his face on the cover of his groundbreaking 1985 book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock’n’Roll. Puckett’s an odd-looking bird, to say the least, which must be the reason Tosches used his photo, because Puckett himself warrants only two passing references in the book.

Puckett was blind, but looks cross-eyed. He has a dimpled chin, jowls, no lips to speak of, and what with his high forehead his facial features seem to have retreated to the center of his face. The effect is hard to describe. Perhaps Tosches thought he best personified that “twisted.” And there’s no denying that his photograph could have come straight out of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip.

But twisted isn’t the word that comes to me. He looks inscrutable, sphinxlike. It’s true that his eyes, one seemingly entranced by his nose and the other buried in the shadow cast by his brow, give him an otherworldly look. It doesn’t help that the book cover paints him in lurid colors, his face a sickly lime green, his hair, shirt collar and tie a bright pink. Tosches did Puckett a disservice, to an extent; in a photo I’ve seen of a younger Puckett he looks dapper, his hair pomaded—he’s almost movie star handsome. This Puckett, an older Puckett obviously, just looks lost in some kind of Depression-era fever dream.

Riley Puckett was born in Georgia in 1894, and early on was dubbed the “Bald Mountain Caruso.” This stemmed from the fact that he had a good voice, and didn’t sound as hillbilly as many of his country contemporaries. He was also an influential guitarist. He recorded a lot of music during his relatively short life, but he’s primarily remembered for being the first country singer to stand up on his hind legs in a recording studio and yodel, first in April 1924 to the song “Rock All Our Babies to Sleep,” then to “Sleep Baby Sleep” in 1927.

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MONTREAL, CA | When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have played on past Halloweens, he’d sometimes start by emerging from a coffin. For the first big concert since he turned 75 weeks before, that spooky symbolism might have hit a little too close to home.

So he kicked off his Halloween show at the Bell Center in Montreal with something more goofy—a cover of “Ghostbusters.” The ever-professional, super-augmented E Street Band could acquit the Ray Parker Jr. oldie well, of course, and to their credit only did a couple of verses, before moving to the more bracing rocker of economic unrest, “Seeds.”

Known to wear the occasional Halloween getup over the years, Springsteen stuck to his recent stage uniform of a kind of hip maître d’ in white shirt, tie, black vest and rolled-up sleeves. The Montreal show was, like dozens of stops on his fraught 23-24 tour, a makeup date (that takes the tour into 2025). Originally scheduled for last November, it instead kicked off a seven-city fall Canadian tour.

Despite the ghostbusting, spirits of the past would repeatedly arise in the long set, from “Ghosts” and the title track from his 2020 Letter to You, a work inspired by the death of the last other member of his original Jersey band The Castiles, George Theiss, who died in 2018. Inheriting his friend’s guitar, books and records inspired songs on that album (intended as a message to him), as it did the E Street Band’s first tour since 2017, much delayed by the pandemic and other illnesses.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ little known 1974 concert album, Saturnight: Live from Tokyo, is scheduled for release in the U.S. for the first time ever, 50 years after it was released only in Japan, due to contractual restrictions.

Remastered from the original production master for the first time since its original release, the record will go on sale exclusively as part of Record Store Day’s Black Friday annual event on November 29th. It will be available as an “RSD First” release on 180-gram Orange Splatter color vinyl. The LP has been cut at the world-famous Abbey Road Studios and will be packaged for the first time in a gatefold sleeve that includes lyrics and new liner notes from the band’s 1974 tour manager, Carl Miller, and bassist Bruce Lynch.

Saturnight was recorded on June 22nd, 1974, at Sun Plaza Hall in Nakano, Tokyo, Japan on the Japanese leg of Cat’s 1974 “Bamboozle World Tour.” The tour comprised 50 shows across North America, Europe, Australia and Japan to support the release of Buddha and the Chocolate Box. Cat had long felt an affinity with the aesthetic elegance and spiritual depth of Japanese culture, especially the principles of meditation and reflection upon which their traditions of poetry, design and craftsmanship are founded.

Saturnight features Cat at his peak, performing an incredible concert of songs from his then-newest release, Buddha and the Chocolate Box (“Oh Very Young,” “King of Trees,” “A Bad Penny”) alongside some of his greatest hits which dominated the charts in the early ‘70s. These include the classics “Lady D’Arbanville” (Mona Bone Jakon – 1970); “Wild World,” “Where Do The Children Play?” “Hard Headed Woman,” “Father & Son” (Tea for the Tillerman – 1970); “Peace Train,” “Bitterblue” (Teaser and the Firecat – 1971); and “Sitting” (Catch Bull at Four – 1972).

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Celebrating Joni Mitchell on her 81st birthday. —Ed.

My great ambivalence about Joni Mitchell, she of the beret and the aloofly confessional lyrics, is best expressed by the critic Robert Christgau, who addressing her 2000 LP Both Sides Now wrote, “My favorite Joni story is that they tried to do a TV special on her and none of her old friends would pitch in. Even if it’s a dumb rumor or a damned lie, it’s a hell of a metaphor for someone who loves herself so much nobody else need bother, and yet another reason to scoff at her concept song cycle about the rise and fall of an affair. But after decades of pretentious pronouncements on art, jazz, and her own magnificence, this very if briefly great singer-songwriter proves herself a major interpretive singer.”

It’s no mystery Mitchell thinks very highly of herself, but it can be argued she has good reason. There has never been another folk-rock-jazz artist like her; she possesses a voice as clear as a bell and a mode of phrasing that is all her own, with which she sends her semi-confessional lyrics out into the world. That’s the good part, along with her remarkable songwriting skills. The bad part is that if her music sometimes reminds me of that of Steely Dan, it unfortunately lacks their sense of irony and humor.

But that’s just carping. Mitchell may be a prima donna with delusions of grandeur, to say nothing of jazz-lite and boho pretensions, but her music is beloved by many, and admired at a great distance by numerous other folks like yours truly. I mean, I love “Coyote” and “Raised on Robbery” and even “Free Man in Paris,” despite its beatnik affectations and the vocal contributions of those two horrible, horrible people, David Crosby and Graham Nash. (Okay, so only the former is horrible. Sorry, Graham.) Why, I even have a sneaking admiration for her failed 1979 homage to the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, which she kinda screwed up by recruiting members of that middling jazz-fusion band Weather Report as sidemen. But her early work terrifies me and her later work leaves me stone cold.

Ms. Mitchell was the official chronicler of life in Laurel Canyon as seen from a woman’s perspective in the early to mid-seventies, and her gimlet eye for the condemning detail is unsurpassed. And Lord knows Laurel Canyon deserved everything she dished out; not for nothing did Neil Young, a fellow Canadian, write “Revolution Blues,” which imagined a kind of dune buggy apocalypse Manson-style that would kill Laurel Canyon’s pampered and self-indulgent stars in their cars.

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Celebrating Joni Mitchell on her 81st birthday. —Ed.

Joni Mitchell’s discography gathers 19 original albums spanning from the masterful to varying degrees of flawed, a range highlighting her lack of artistic complacency. She’s had her share of compilations, and Rhino’s Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting to be Danced is the third box set devoted to her work. Containing four CDs curated by Mitchell from a long stretch of productivity, it eschews chronology for a quite personal and sometimes frustrating thematic vision.

The first inapt tag I’ve read applied to Love Has Many Faces is “career-spanning,” its usage positing Mitchell’s musical activity beginning with 1971’s Blue. Indeed, nothing from ‘68’s Joni Mitchell/Song to a Seagull, ‘69’s Clouds or ‘70’s Ladies of the Canyon is included here, and it leads me to a minor quibble in the casual use of “greatest-hits” to describe this collection; a few of her larger singles did make the cut, but absent is “Big Yellow Taxi” from Ladies or “Help Me” from ‘74’s Court and Spark.

Given the specifics of this box, the omissions make sense. Artist-assembled and love song-themed (the subject nowhere near as constrictive as a Joni newbie might suppose), these 53 tracks essentially underscore what Mitchell’s made clear since the arrival of Blue; in particular, she’s anything but just another strumming folkie, and as Love Has Many Faces’ accompanying book rounds up 54 poems and six new paintings, at this late date it’s hard to imagine anybody lumping her into that bag.

“I am a painter who writes songs,” Mitchell is quoted in the press materials, and after spending time with the entirety of this set, at less than a minute shy of four hours long no small undertaking, I consider the key portion of her statement as “writes songs.” Over the years she’s done a good job transcending mere writing to enter the realm of robust musicality, though her self-assessment does differ, and at points substantially, with this reviewer’s evaluation of her oeuvre.

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