Michael Fremer

After a series of albums that tried too hard to advance the cause and so seemed self-consciously so, Paul Simon has produced his best since Graceland. The album title explains how he's managed. It celebrates the significant but demolishes it at the same time.

In 1975, with complete artistic control written into his new Columbia Records contract, Willie Nelson entered Autumn Sound, a small Garland, Texas studio, to record a sparely arranged concept album based upon the semi-obscure song "The Red Haired Stranger," written by Carl Stutz, a Richmond, Virginia based radio announcer  and Edith Lindeman Calisch, the amusement critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper. The pair was best known for writing "Little Things Mean A Lot," which was a hit single for the pop star Kitty Kallen back in 1954 and featured on the wildly popular TV show "Your Hit Parade." Stutz went on to become a high-school math teacher.  

Knowing Bernie Grundman, there’s something amusing about thinking of him cutting the lacquers for this ORG reissue of Nirvana’s “cull” album of demos, outtakes and radio broadcasts.

"My girlfriend loves everything at the beach except the sand, the surf and the sun."  That lyric pretty much sums up the playful, sensous, and dangerous kitsch-world of this exotic six person  L.A. group fronted by the black widow spider persona of the sexy Cambodian pop chantreuse Chhom Nimol whose fixation with '60s Cambodian pop fuels the music.