1978's Northwinds, David Coverdale's second solo album after the demise of Deep Purple, is a powerful dose of blues- and R&B-influenced hard rock. This album – the final new release on Purple Records – is also a huge leap forward in quality from the previous year's White Snake, a tentative and generally cautious record. As with White Snake, Northwinds was produced by Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover and is anchored by guitarist Micky Moody and keyboardist Tim Hinckley. Bassist Alan Spenner and drummer Tony Newman comprise the rhythm section. "Keeping on Giving Me Love" is loose and funky and a blowout jam wraps it up.

Off the Wall was a massive success, spawning four Top Ten hits (two of them number ones), but nothing could have prepared Michael Jackson for Thriller. Nobody could have prepared anybody for the success of Thriller, since the magnitude of its success was simply unimaginable – an album that sold 40 million copies in its initial chart run, with seven of its nine tracks reaching the Top Ten (for the record, the terrific "Baby Be Mine" and the pretty good ballad "The Lady in My Life" are not like the others). This was a record that had something for everybody, building on the basic blueprint of Off the Wall by adding harder funk, hard rock, softer ballads, and smoother soul – expanding the approach to have something for every audience.

Kirsty MacColl first emerged on the British pop scene as something of a novelty – her first single was the girl group pastiche "They Don't Know," which became a hit when covered by comic Tracey Ullman, and her first chart success on her own was the witty country-styled number "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis." But in 1989, MacColl released the album Kite, which revealed she was one of the best and most insightful U.K. songwriters of her generation, with a body of work that was witty, disarmingly honest, eclectic, and adventurous. A motorboat accident claimed MacColl's life in 2000, cutting short a career that was still in motion. All I Ever Wanted: The Anthology is a two-disc collection that brings together highlights from MacColl's albums Kite, Electric Landlady (1991), Titanic Days (1993), and the posthumous Tropical Brainstorm (2001), as well as early singles, 12" remixes, and BBC radio performances.

The 'Romantic Piano Concerto' reaches its quarter century with two concertos that suffer their neglect with the least justification; indeed it's hard to see why MacDowell's Second in particular isn't up there with the Grieg as one of the most-loved nineteenth-century concertos.

Das Wohltemperirte Clavier, a collection of preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys completed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1722, was clearly modelled along the lines of Ariadne Musica by Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (1662-1746, Kapellmeister in Baden from 1715 to 1746) – an organ music anthology published for the first time in 1702 and probably known by Bach in its second 1715 edition. Bach took Fischer’s original layout of 20 keys and expanded it to a total of 24, thereby creating the first self-contained collection of music written for the entire corpus of existing keys.

Michael Franks' first album of the '90s and his first in three years was a complete return to form and his best album since 1979's Tiger in the Rain. Meditative, lush and clearly the work of an artist intent on making personal music regardless of trends or airplay, Blue Pacific is as open and beautiful as the ocean for which it is named. The return of the production team of Tommy LiPuma and Al Schmitt doesn't hurt either, and with such veteran pros as Dean Parks, John Guerin, John Patitucci and Peter Erskine on board, how could Franks miss? With additional production and engineering support by Walter Becker and Roger Nichols, the Steely Dan connection, previously hinted at, was finally made, with great results. It's pointless to single out individual songs, since this is very much a complete, unified work. The album marked a total rebirth for Franks.

Throughout the 1990’s, Hiatt recorded a series of well-received and commercially successful albums and toured widely. Chart position by now became perhaps less relevant to Hiatt's career: he was developing a consistently supportive audience; he was nominated for Grammy awards. By the end of the decade, Hiatt was releasing albums on independent labels and achieving consistent success outside mainstream commercial structures. In this 2003 concert, Hiatt is joined by Sonny Landreth on guitar, David Ranson on bass, and Kevin Blevins on drums – the tight and virtuoso combo Hiatt dubs the Goners; these musicians had played on "Slow Turning", and "The Tiki Bar Is Open", as well as on "Beneath This Gruff Exterior", Hiatt's most recent album when this concert was recorded.

The quality of the recorded sound is so perfectly clear on this recording, like finely etched crystal, while at the same time it is so robust and resonant, that it is difficult to believe that the piano played on these two marvelous CDs is a replica of a 1785 Walter fortepiano, a smaller and much more fragile instrument than today's modern concert grand pianos.