I still recall going into my local record store in 1991 and asking for Seal’s debut album on cassette. (It was Bloomington, IN’s Tracks, now sadly a t-shirt-dominant “spirit shop” with just a handful of records on its wall.) The clerk asked how I’d heard of the then-new artist, and I’m not sure how I replied. I know I was familiar at the time with his collaboration with British house star Adamski, 1990’s UK #1 “Killer”; I assume I’d likely also come across his proper debut single, “Crazy,” as well, which had already been a hit in the UK. (“Crazy” hadn’t yet been released in the U.S.) What I knew was that I’d already found Seal so compelling that I had to have his first album, and of course this being long before not just streaming services but downloading, if a single caught your ear, and you thought you might want more, you plunked down your money for an album.

To this day, I’m glad I did.

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His most distinctive production since Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm in 1985, what Trevor Horn did with Seal and his batch of songs - four co-written with fellow debutante Guy Sigsworth (who’d go on to a long career working with everyone from Bomb the Bass and Björk to Madonna and Britney Spears; the less said about his stint in Frou Frou, the better), four penned solo, and a new take on his Adamski collaboration, “Killer” - was something else. This album soars, not just on its string arrangements (courtesy of Horn’s Art of Noise colleague Anne Dudley), but on the sense of uplift Horn gives it. Seal is a dramatic album, starting but by no means ending with his global smash “Crazy.”

Even though it sounds like pop today, for ‘90-’91, it’s a truly original-sounding single. His time with Adamski clearly rubbed off on Seal, because there are hints of acid house in the DNA of “Crazy,” lurking. Listen to that propulsive bassline. And the way Horn multitracks Seal’s vocals into a chorus is glorious. Not to mention that, on the album, the song works as a perfect bridge between the adult contemporary, string-soaked soul of “Deep Water” and Horn/Seal’s reworking of “Killer,” a song so striking that it should be no shock that George Michael felt it worthy of covering.

My favorite moment on Seal might be the opening of side two (remember how albums used to be broken into sides?), specifically the first minute of “Future Love Paradise.” Seal sings the song’s first two words a capella, with Horn then building in elements slowly: synth chords, some effects, a keyboard melody, Seal singing his own harmonies, before another killer of a bassline drops in at 0:58, and everything heads up to the heavens. It’s such a striking way to open an album side - and I love that they held this for side two, rather than giving it away as side one’s start. “Paradise” goes through a couple of movements over its four-plus minutes, each precise and perfect on its own. Combined, it commits murder.

The song which does open the album, fittingly titled “The Beginning,” goes back earnestly to Seal’s acid house roots, perfect for a song whose chorus proclaims “The music takes you round and round and round and round/Hold onto love.” I mean, that’s the damn ethos of the second Summer of Love, innit?

As the album wraps up, you can definitely hear signs of what Seal would become: “Show Me” and “Violet” (the former especially, with its shades of “Kiss From a Rose” to come) definitely show off his adult pop tendencies, and I wish he hadn’t embraced that side of himself so wholeheartedly. That said, “Violet” has become one of my quiet-time favorites, just a gorgeous, contemplative, willfully long track. Part of what makes this debut such a success is its refusal to simply cop to radio-readiness. At its best, Seal doesn’t sound quite like anything else, not that was surrounding it at the time and not even that came after. Which is precisely why it remains Seal’s best album.

Recently at work someone was talking about replacing an image in a newsletter, and as often happens, my brain immediately populated with “Images” from Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella. (Yes, I’m aware that I’m weird.) No joke, most of the time this is my favorite Reed album, and maybe my favorite Cale, too. And its lyrics lodge in my brain profoundly: “Hammer, sickle, Mao! Tse! Tung!”

It’s so simple in its ways. The instrumentation is just Reed on electric guitar and Cale on viola and keyboards, along with both of them singing — though both are really more talk-singing, as they’re prone to do. I don’t need to tell you how the album, their first collab since White Light/White Heat, can together; you can read its Wiki page. The songs are all about their quasi-mentor Andy Warhol (“Drella” was a nickname given to him that he hated). And damned near everyone one of them hits, and hits hard.

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The autobiographical songs, those sung from Warhol’s perspective, those about Andy: all work. “Starlight,” sung by Lou as Andy about the early years of the Factory and wanting to make everyone famous, is remarkable, especially when the former pouts an angry growl into his voice — something you wouldn’t expect to hear from the latter himself. “A Dream” is positively haunting, and of course Cale narrates it. The division of labor on display is just perfect. These two, of course, know exactly what they’re doing. The beautiful, Velvet-ian dissonance of some of this music, such as the contrast between Reed’s squawking guitar lines and Cale’s synths on “Images”: chef’s kiss.

And this isn’t just a mash note to Warhol, either; they pick some bones with him, too. But the end result is a loving portrait of the man without whom neither of them may ever have become famous (or, if you prefer, “famous”). Warhol is to my thinking the most important visual artist of the 20th century, full stop. [Upon his death in 1987 I wore a black armband to high school the next day. Yes, at age 16.] Songs for Drella is, frankly, the tribute Andy deserves, warts and — especially and — all.

[Worth noting: the film of Reed and Cale performing the album front-to-back is currently available streaming on the Criterion Channel.]

In 1983, Linda Ronstadt, one of the biggest women in pop/rock music (country, too) for almost 10 years at the time, turned her back on it. From 1974-78, she became the first female artist to notch five consecutive platinum studio albums in the U.S. — and all five of those made the top five on both Billboard’s pop and country album charts. A sixth, 1980’s new wavish Mad Love, didn’t chart country but made it to #3 on the pop chart and extended Ronstadt’s platinum streak to six. (1976’s Greatest Hits also went platinum, getting to #6 pop/#2 country as well.) 1982’s Get Closer was a rare commercial wobble, only going gold and making it to #31 pop/#19 country. (It’s one of my favorites of hers.) And then came a series of artistic hard left turns.

‘83 saw Ronstadt release an album of standards (what we now think of as “American songbook”) by the likes of the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, and Sammy Cahn, made with orchestrations and arrangements by the great Nelson Riddle. What’s New was a surprise smash, peaking at #3 on the Billboard Top LP’s and Tape chart (a/k/a the Billboard 200), only prevented from climbing higher from a pair of album you may have heard of, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down. A follow-up, Lush Life, came at the end of ‘84, followed by 1986’s For Sentimental Reasons. All three sold platinum.

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Next came 1987’s Trio, a collaboration with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, with whom Ronstadt had been friends and occasional singing partners since the mid-’70s. (There’s a great segment in the Ronstadt documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice about the musical and personal relationships between the three.) The album hit #6 pop and #1 country, and reeled off a quartet of top 10 country singles, including their chart-topping cover of “To Know Him Is To Love Him.”

And then — and then — Ronstadt really swung for the proverbial fences, releasing an album of the beloved mariachi songs of her youth (her father had partial Mexican ancestry), Canciones de Mi Padre. In an appalling two-star Rolling Stone review, David Browne snidely called the album “a risky commercial move at a time when Ronstadt could use a Top Ten hit.” But whatcha know: the album became the biggest-selling non-English language album in U.S. history, a title it held for decades. Once again, Ronstadt’s instincts served her well.

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All that said, when Ronstadt made her return to pop music with 1989’s Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, there was no assurance that it would be a hit. Her last such record, remember, wasn’t much of a hit, and had been released seven years prior. But she teamed back up with her long-time manager and producer Peter Asher, commissioned a bunch of songs from the likes of Jimmy Webb (who contributed four) and Karla Bonoff (who wrote/co-wrote three), and — and this was Ronstadt’s masterstroke — called in Aaron Neville to duet with her on four of the album’s eventual twelve songs. The album was even released credited to “Linda Ronstadt featuring Aaron Neville.” The album’s first single, the Ronstadt/Neville duet “Don’t Know Much,” hit #1 Adult Contemporary, which wasn’t all that surprising. What was surprising was its pop success: on the final Hot 100 of 1989, it climbed to #2, sandwiched between Phil Collins’s “Another Day in Paradise” and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” And this wasn’t a “payola hit,” either; I distinctly recall hearing it on top 40 radio, and friends in other parts of the country have said the same. “Don’t Know Much” was an honest-to-goodness smash. It dragged its parent album into the top 10 with it, getting Cry Like a Rainstorm… to a peak of #7.

“Much,” a Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil/Tom Snow co-write, is an okay song improved upon greatly by Neville and Ronstadt’s vocals, especially the former’s. Follow-up single “All My Life,” another duet, also topped the AC chart, while making it to #11 pop. It’s a Bonoff composition that towers above “Much.” The way the strings swell in and out, especially on the bridge, is grand, and both singers sound much more free and easy on “Life” than they do on “Much.” The album’s third single, a cover of the Sam & Dave soul classic “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” (again, a Ronstadt/Neville duet), is fine but frankly a little unexciting. (Well sung, though, as you might expect.) Jimmy Webb’s “Adios” was the final single released from the album, and it’s an unqualified knockout. Arranged and with backing vocals by Brian Wilson, a/k/a Mr. California (love or hate him, that’s what his voice so instantly evokes), this “goodbye” song is of a piece with its setting, “on the California coast.” Ronstadt had by this point lived in the Golden State for many years, and is so associated with it, that this song sounds tailor-made for her. (On 1982’s Get Closer, she beautifully sang another Webb-penned California song, “Talk to Me of Mendocino.”) Ronstadt makes “Adios” marvelous, and Wilson makes it perfect.

And there are more highlights, too. Webb’s album opener, “Still Within the Sound of My Voice,” is a hopelessly uplifting slice of Adult Contemporary pop — which in this case should be heard as a compliment. “Trouble Again,” co-written by Bonoff and Ronstadt’s former colleague in the Stone Poneys, Kenny Edwards, moves her back to her ‘70s rocking; by 1989 it sounds a little bit like an oldie, but that’s not always a bad thing. And Ronstadt hits a note at 1:24 that she holds — no studio trickery — for a full, glorious 10 seconds. It’ll stick with you. One more rocker (okay, near-rocker) needs mentioning, “So Right, So Wrong,” which was co-written by five men, including Paul Carrack and Nick Lowe! Really! And features the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir. Really! Ronstadt sings it with such ease and comfort, like slipping back into an old pair of jeans.

Ronstadt, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 was part of the 2019 class for the Kennedy Center Honors, had to stop performing over a decade ago, due to Parkinson’s disease. She recorded other fine pop albums before her forced retirement, but none as big — neither commercially (it’s one of her three best-selling albums in the U.S.) nor sound-wise (take a moment to praise Peter Asher) — as Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind. If you only remember it for its big hit duets with Aaron Neville, spend some time with it; you may find yourself delightfully surprised by its warmth and superb song selection. And if you remember it as a whole, by all means pull it out again and glory in its brilliance. We’d never get Ronstadt on quite this level again; thank goodness we got it at all.

The problem with this document of a 1992 show at Le Zenith in Paris is that it’s so willfully deep cut-oriented that, even as a longtime Cure fan, many of these selections are songs I don’t care about hearing. And then the two hits they do are “Lovesong” and “Close to Me,” neither of which I particularly need to ever hear again. “One Hundred Years” hits pretty hard, and their playing is fine, but this isn’t a record to which I’ll return.

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Barry White’s 40-piece backing orchestra was the ultimate disco orchestra (though Vince Montana might have some thoughts on that), notching a pop #1 with their debut single, “Love’s Theme” before their “maestro” himself did – and honestly, they were progenitors to disco, as that single came out in 1973. Their 2nd studio LP mines the same vein as their first, utilizing horns and a massive string section to great effect to make superb, sexy soul music. White produced and wrote or co-wrote every song on the album, & does spoken-word openings to some of the songs, which sound like his own instrumentals – since that’s essentially what they are. And isn’t that all you could want? Utterly sublime.

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Grace Jones has always, always, been 100% original. Even at the start of her career in the 1970s, singing disco produced by Tom Moulton, nobody sounded like her. Her voice has a tone so unique it’s unimaginable that anyone could copy it — and she’s got the attitude to back it up. She was a hardcore Studio 54 habitué during the disco years, after time spent as a runway model in Europe (Europe has always loved her). As the decade changes she started recording at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, working with Sly & Robbie through the most fruitful period of her career. Turns out that voice was perfectly suited for Sly & Robbie’s contempo-dub tracks.

Jones has never received the credit she deserves as a song stylist and interpreter, either, nowhere near. We talk about what a legendary job Linda Ronstadt has done with others’ songs, but not Jones, and that’s absurd. There’s an argument to be made that her interpretive skills are actually superior to Ronstadt’s, and the latter is (also) a legend. On her first album, 1977’s Portfolio, the first side consisted of covers of three legendary — and then-recent — Broadway songs: Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music, “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line, and Annie’s “Tomorrow.” She pulls all of ‘em off. And of course during her Compass Point days the covers came fast & furious: Tom Petty, the Normal, Roxy Music, the Pretenders, Bill Withers, Iggy Pop, the Marvelettes, Joy Division… and that’s just a drop in the bucket to indicate the breadth and depth with which she sang others’ songs.

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And then there’s “ Pull Up to the Bumper.” Spoiler alert: no matter what its video tries to convince you of, it ain’t about driving cars.

Filthy without making it so obvious, riding the perfect Sly & Robbie groove, this had to be a hit — and was, in Europe, and on the US R&B chart (#5!). American top 40 radio ignored this in 1982, but who can be surprised considering what radio sounded like that in that moment?

And then there’s “Slave to the Rhythm,” Jones’ greatest moment.

This — and especially its accompanying EP — is over the top even for producer Trevor Horn. And he made Welcome to the Pleasure Dome! This is literally nothing but drama that just builds, and builds, and builds. Horn keeps piling on the layers and yet none of them ever feel excessive, akin in a way to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” “Slave” is the apotheosis of Grace Jones.

She proved on 2008’s Hurricane that she’s still got it. And she’s continued to prove it in live performance over the ensuing years; when I saw her in 2009 at the Hollywood Bowl, she wore 10 different costumes to sing 11 songs, and her vocals never faltered. Grace Jones is a genius. Grace Jones is the whole package. Grace Jones is a legend.

[I recommend enjoying this playlist, which is in no order, on shuffle.]

The only Grace album I’d somehow never heard all the way through! She sounds (that one-in-a-million voice!) great as ever, and Nile Rodgers’ production keeps things interesting, but the songs – all co-written by Jones with Bruce Woolley – are highly inconsistent. “Victor Should Have Been a Jazz Musician” is slinky and smoldering, while the album’s lead single “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You)” is, in fact, perfect, a dramatic dance track befitting the grandeur of Miss Jones. But “Crush” is a good groove in search of a song, and the likes of “Chan Hitchhikes to Shanghai” and “Barefoot in Beverly Hills” are throwaways.

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The original flagship band of Canadian indie Nettwerk, this industrial trio were good, smart, and often very (unintentionally) silly on their debut LP. They loved sampling the audio from film clips and dealt with very serious topics (animal testing, nuclear war) in ways which I’ve always found difficult to take seriously. (Ogre’s heavily treated vocals didn’t help matters.) That said: this is often thought-provoking industrial dance music which works both at home and in the club. The likes of “Dead Lines” show what they could do at their best.

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Most definitely not anything approaching new wave, even though I recall at the time they got lumped in with the likes of OMD by lazy Yank crits, ostensibly for being a British duo using synths. But this is firmly a centrist pop album, with a bizarre guitar solo on “Haunted” and a limp ballad, “Goodbye Girl” – OMD would never. Side two, which includes both of those, is utterly bereft of ideas, but in contrast side one is larded with all of the album’s singles, all good-to-great, including the ebullient “We Close Our Eyes,” the slightly less ebullient “Don’t Look Down,” and the pulsing “Call Me.” This should’ve been an EP.

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The first album by an all-female hip hop group – including the late great R&B singer Angie Stone, credited as Angie B – is entertaining and thoroughly an early ‘80s Sugar Hill record, with live instrumentation backing simple, solid rapping. “Funky Sound” is a fun reworking of Parliament’s funk classic “Tear the Roof off the Sucker,” while “The Times We’re Alone” is a completely unnecessary ballad; at least the latter further distinguished them in their era. “And You Know That” is the most effective track here.

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Billboard’s #1 album of 1981 is a perfect example of why AOR radio was so good in the early part of the decade. It’s front-loaded in that all 4 of its singles are on side one, and 3 of the 4 are killers (“In Your Letter” is some stupid faux-’50s bullshit, but “Take It on the Run” and especially “Don’t Let Him Go” rock hot, and “Keep on Loving You” is one in a long line of great early ‘80s rock ballads cf. Journey, Foreigner, et.al.). That said, don’t sleep on side two, whose “Tough Guys” and “Shakin’ It Loose” hit the target too. A much more solid album than you might expect; certainly better than I’d expected. And its title is an all-timer.

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Delay is a genius at both abrasive (2020’s stunner Rakka) and smooth (2004’s The Present Lover, under his Luomo moniker) techno, and now the endlessly musically curious Finn has taken on mostly-acoustic jazz with his latest project. “twenty” sounds like Aphex Twin at his most contemplative, with Keith Jarrett improvising over top, while “two” uses dissonant synths and a lub-dub heartbeat motif to great effect. & the way that sax bleats on “fifteen”! As evidenced by records like this one, Prepared’s Module from last year and the early work of Brandt Brauer Frick, more techno musicians should make jazz, or something like it.

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This unsung vocalist can match producer/co-writer Stevie Wonder’s moxie, evident by the way she takes on both his own songs and those they co-wrote. Anyone who loves Wonder’s early-mid ‘70s work (isn’t that nearly everyone?) and good female soul vocals should check this out. “Just a Little Piece of You” could easily have been on Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Syreeta should’ve been a star.

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Ish Ledesma was for over two decades one of the most versatile men in pop, and you likely didn’t even know it. He spearheaded not one but two great one-hit wonders of the ‘80s, Oxo’s “Whirly Girl” (#28 pop, 1983) and Company B’s freestyle killer “Fascinated” (#21 pop/#1 dance, 1987). His first band, Foxy, started out as the TK Records house band after KC & the Sunshine Band “graduated” to success on their own, and ended up becoming hitmakers themselves. He’s got a couple of weird solo discs in his catalog, played on the likes of Miami Sound Machine’s “Bad Boy” and Gwen McCrae’s “Rockin’ Chair,” and brought the world the phenomenal dance record “Through the Night” by Blue Moderne.

Chances are you’ve heard at most of the albums he created, let alone all three of these; I certainly hadn’t!

Foxy, Get Off (1978): Foxy honed their chops as TK Records’ second house band, and you can hear ‘em here on their shockingly great debut.Opener “Tena’s Song” smoothly apes “Cherchez le Femme” but might be better? That and “Lucky Me” together make it very clear that Foxy is a band, and they can play. “Goin’ Back to You” gives EWF energy while “Ready for Love” and “You” are perfectly disco floor-ready. I don’t love the title track single, never have, but YMMV. If you’re a disco fan, you need to know this record.

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Oxo (1983): “Whirly Girl” is one of my favorite one-hit wonders of the ‘80s, perfectly peppy power pop for which I don’t normally go, with some clever lyrics. But “Dance All Night” is bland as bland, and from there this just deflates into faux-new wave pop and worse, save for “In the Stars” which returns to the “Whirly Girl” well w/ lightly diminishing returns, but gets over on its chorus’s ascending & descending harmonies. Nothing on side two need be heard. A huge disappointment. [Not on Spotify.]

Company B (1987): Ish Ledesma put together freestyle trio Company B (incl his wife) and produced, played, and wrote most of their debut. The classic single “Fascinated” is truly deathless (& filthy: “I’m fascinated by your love toy”!). “Book of Love” and “Full Circle” are more Shannon-esque Miami freestyle, “Jam on Me” verges on electro, “I’m Satisfied” is hot-ass post-disco reminiscent of Fonda Rae’s “Touch Me,” and closer “Infatuate Me” is a grittier “Fascinated.” And key: no ballads! Enjoyable all the way through.

Opener “Hey Hi Hello” kicks things off sounding like budget Kylie Minogue, and while “Reverberotic” has a bit of early Daft Punk in it and some fun woozy keys and rhythms that make it stand out a smidge, this entire album sounds like budget Kylie. Richard X’s production is fine, but doesn’t sparkle like he used to; Goldfrapp’s vocals even sound like Minogue’s, that breathy half-whisper. Obviously this isn’t bad, because Kylie is great, but everything here could’ve been on a Kylie record of the last 30 years. Sadly there’s no real reason for this album to exist. Goldfrapp looks sharp on the cover, though.

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For years I swore that the only Stevie Wonder I needed was 1982’s perfect double comp Original Musiquarium I and II, which starts in ’72 and runs through ’82. But I was young, and I was wrong. Goddamn, what a catalog. You need more, a lot more. We all do. His fourth singles were often better than other artists’ first singles.

My favorite album of his front-to-back is likely 1980’s Hotter Than July, which runs from the gorgeous balladry of “All I Do” and “Lately” (superbly covered by Jodeci on Uptown MTV Unplugged) to the the hard reggae-funk of “Master Blaster (Jammin’)” and the country-funk of “I Ain’t Gonna Stand For It,” one of the most unexpected gems in his back catalog. I like Songs in the Key of Life fine, especially its late singles “As” and “Another Star,” but find it the teensiest bit overrated as a whole. And apart from what my pal Chris Molanphy has called his “Cosby years” (roughly “Ebony and Ivory” + The Woman in Red + maybe half of the undervalued In Square Circle), Wonder funked harder than you may recall in the ’80s: check some of the nasty on ’87’s Characters, especially “Skeletons” and the best anti-apartheid song ever written, “Dark ‘n’ Lovely” (yes, better even than my fiercely beloved “Sun City”)

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I’ve heard the full, 10-minute version of “Do I Do” (#2 R&B/#13 pop, 1982) out in the wild twice in the past two weeks. What?! I’m not at all mad, just shocked. It jams so hard. That’s the thing about Wonder: he can give you the most heartbreaking ballad and then turn around and deliver a masterclass in the funk.

…And then there’s the 1985 Grammy Awards “synthesizer summit,” which I’ll take any opportunity to share, with apologies for the Howard Jones screencap. (Warning: show host John Denver deadnames synth groundbreaker Wendy Carlos.) You wanna know what a fucking badass Wonder was? He ends the medley by running through much of “Go Home,” which wouldn’t come out for over another year! But when you’re Stevie Wonder, you do whatever you want to do.

He’s eternally cool. He’s one of the greatest of all time. And even “I Just Called to Save I Love You” is better than you likely remember. (Plus, it won the man an Oscar, and you can’t balk at Stevie Wonder having an Oscar.)

Here’s a playlist of my personal Wonder favorites, which does not include his Oscar winner.

The A&M honcho and commercial trumpet star followed up the massive success of Rise & its attendant chart-topping title track by returning to his Latin musical roots, à la the Tijuana Brass, and recording in Mexico. The ensuing album splits the difference between early ‘80s production and his classic sound and sounds great; production has generally been one of Alpert’s strengths. “Route 101,” his final instrumental pop top 40 (don’t sleep on the magnificent Janet-featuring “Diamonds”!), is a jaunty groove that’s always been one of my favorites, but don’t sleep on the rest, most of which is plenty entertaining. Jazz it’s really not, but good instrumental pop it is. Fun fact: the cover portrait was shot by no less a photographic eminence than Richard Avedon.

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Phil Collins’ “Separate Lives” duet partner made her debut LP off the back of that #1 single after working with plenty of the right bizzers – she’d sung backup for the likes of Nicks, Petty, Loggins, and Joe Walsh, and had heavy major label support. But this frankenalbum, larded with a myriad of writers and producers, never coalesces, attempting to get over on Martin’s admittedly strong voice. Minor hit “Night Moves” (co-written by John Parr, I kid you not) is trashy high-drama fun, and “Beauty and the Beast” follows in that vein, but too much of the rest is just anonymous hard mid ‘80s pop.

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There’s likely no artist I’ve listened to more in the past year than Mount Shrine, who makes dark ambient mixed in with other natural (and unnatural) sounds. This 5CD, four-hour-plus set of previously unreleased material which I’d somehow missed is very rainy – in that it includes a lot of recordings of rain mixed in with the drone, to great effect. When I need to zone out or block out everything, this is what I turn to.

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I know that Glenn-Copeland is a trans male legend and an important historical figure in New Age music, but, uh. This is Music from the Hearts of Space-core in the most early ‘80s stereotypical definition of New Age possible. Most of his keyboard fantasies, apparently, are of the tinkly mall-kiosk-synth variety. I wanted to love this, but just can’t.

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