Manufacturer: Real World Records

Manufacturer: Virgin

Joni Mitchell would go on from this 1971 recording to make more popular, more ambitious and more challenging albums, but she's never made a better one. Working with minimal accompaniment (Stephen Stills and James Taylor are two of the four sidemen), the Canadian songbird summoned an involving song cycle of romance found and lost. Though Blue is an uncommonly intimate representation, it's ...

Manufacturer: Reprise

Manufacturer: Rhino

Manufacturer: Real World

Manufacturer: EMI

For the nine years prior to the release of Ten New Songs the legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen was mostly in a Zen monastery, obsessively rewriting and polishing the oblique, lapidary lyrics for this austere collection. Ten New Songs is arguably Sharon Robinson's record as much as Cohen's--she co-wrote all the songs, plays most of the instruments (primarily a synth that seems to ...

Manufacturer: Columbia

He has a voice made of vintage leather, probably sprinkles tobacco on his cornflakes, cut his rock-incisors in the Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age and is currently also one half of post-grunge supergroup The Gutter Twins. She has a voice like a mild summer breeze whistling through a meadow and once drizzled aural honey over Belle & Sebastian's twee indie-pop. It's like a marriage made ...

Manufacturer: V2 Records

Manufacturer: Dixiefrog

Proclaiming his intentions with "Are You Ready for the Country?", Young detoured briefly to the Nashville mainstream. On this 1972 album, even the singer's acquired-taste voice comes across smooth and beautiful--the smash "Heart of Gold", with steel guitars and Linda Ronstadt's backup vocals, is by far Young's most commercial-sounding song. His usual dissonant touches, like the otherworldly guitar ...

Manufacturer: Warner