Dance Into the Light is as self-explanatory as titles get: after dwelling in the darkness following a divorce and a split from Genesis, Phil Collins is ready to get happy. That isn't to say Dance Into the Light is devoid of either ambition or sobriety: Collins turns "Just Another Story" into a piece of meditative funk, while "Wear My Hat," "River So Wide," and "Lorenzo" find the drummer delving into African rhythms reminiscent of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and Sting (it also points toward the work Collins did on Tarzan just a few years later). Nevertheless, the overall tenor of the record is bright and cheerful, the sound of a man ready for a revival. Sometimes, he'll throw out a specific callback to his past – the title track recalls the snappy punch of "Sussudio" – but often, he settles into an expertly modulated craft, favoring sprightly pop to somnolent ballads. Given this chipper outlook, it's odd that the thing that undoes Dance Into the Light – outside of the slight cognitive dissonance between the straight-ahead pop and Afrobeat explorations – is an indulgence all too typical of '90s albums made with the CD in mind: tracks stretch out one or two minutes longer than necessary, adding up to a 13-track album that feels flabby at just over an hour. Trimmed by 20 minutes, this would've been a nice little adult pop album, but as it stands, it sounds like a lively little record attempting to escape its immaculately tailored straitjacket.

Bruce Springsteen Among rock music's most iconic figures, Bruce Springsteen often feels like the one who loves and believes in rock & roll the most, eager to re-create the breathless emotions it brings out in him. Embracing the pleasures of the sounds of AM radio in the 1950s and '60s (garage rock, British Invasion, R&B, blue-eyed soul, emotional teen pop) with the literacy of the singer/songwriter movement and a fierce desire to document the lives of the blue-collar world in which he grew up, Springsteen's music was always a grand, ambitious amalgam. (He once said he dreamed of making an album with words like Bob Dylan, sounding like Phil Spector, and with vocals like Roy Orbison.) His sound found full flower on 1973's eclectic The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (which introduced his most important backing group, the E Street Band), and he rose to stardom with 1975's streetwise, sweeping Born to Run. 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town and 1980's The River marked a thematic shift, as his songs addressed the malaise of the working class, whose dreams had begun slipping out of reach.

The Cream of Eric Clapton is a strong collection that provides an excellent overview of one of rock music's premier performers. Though the title might imply that the selections here are from Clapton's recordings as a part of the British supergroup Cream, the range is much broader, beginning with Clapton's earliest professional work with the Yardbirds and concluding with many of his most popular solo hits. There's an excellent historical perspective in the choices included, and this is an excellent introduction to Clapton's career. Of particular historical interest are "Crossroads," "I Shot the Sheriff," and "Behind the Mask," which showcase the eclectic influences that form Clapton's career. Much of the increased mainstream interest in traditional blues, reggae, and electronica can be credited to these cover versions, which introduced the works of Robert Johnson and Bob Marley to a wider audience.

This perfect collection brings together hits, radio favorites, album tracks and more, showing all sides to Cat Stevens emotive songwriting. He never sounded like anyone else, nor has anyone else sounded like him since. He is, without a doubt, one of the great singer/songwriter icons of the '70s, Although his songs are barely three decades old, they sound like they've always been here.

After teaming up with Herbie Hancock for the jazz-flavored The Swing of Delight album, Carlos Santana reentered the pop/rock realm with the rest of his band for 1981's Zebop!. He still managed to include a little bit of his famed Latino sound into a few of the tracks ("E Papa Re," "American Gypsy"), albeit only slightly, but Zebop!'s overall feel is that of commercial rock, with the guitar arriving at the forefront through most of the cuts. Santana does a marvelous job at covering Russ Ballard's "Winning," taking it to number 17 on the charts, while "The Sensitive Kind" is built around the same type of radio-friendly structure yet it stalled at number 56. Zebop!'s formula is simple, and all of the songs carry an appeal that is aimed at a wider and more marketable audience base, with "Changes," "Searchin," and "I Love You Much Too Much" coming through as efficient yet not overly extravagant rock & roll efforts. The album's adjustable rhythms and accommodating structures kept the band alive as the decade rolled over, peaking at number 33 in the U.K. but cracking the Top Ten in the United States, which eventually led to Zebop! going gold. Actually, "Winning" followed in the same footsteps as Santana's last couple of Top 40 singles in "You Know That I Love You" from 1980 and "Stormy" from 1979. Shango, the album that came after Zebop!, gave them another hit with "Hold On," sung by bandmember Alex Ligertwood. © Mike DeGagne

This record was pressed from a master cut using a precision technique known as half-speed mastering. The procedure requires the source master and the cutting lathe to run at half speed on a specially adapted Neumann VMS-80 lathe.
This specialised technique transforms difficult to cut high-end frequencies into easier to cut mid-range frequencies. The result is a cut with excellent high frequency response and very solid and stable stereo images. In short, half-speed mastering produces a master of the highest quality.In addition to being half-speed mastered, we have cut the main studio album as a double L.P. "Flaming Pie" originates from a period when the CD was allowing longer running times and as a result this album is a little too long for a good quality single L.P.While it could be made to fit on one vinyl disc, compromises would need to be employed to the audio. Typically, this would entail a combination of reducing
the level, limiting the amount of low frequency information and narrowing the stereo width. To avoid these compromises, this L.P. has been cut as a double.Miles Showell Mastering Engineer, Abbey Road Studios

Not the first posthumous compilation from David Bowie – that would be the lavish box Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), which was planned prior to his January 10, 2016 death – Legacy is nevertheless the first designed with his, well, legacy in mind. That much can be gleaned from the title of the compilation, but that's a bit of a feint since this set essentially repackages the simplest incarnation of a previous Bowie hits compilation, 2014's Nothing Has Changed. Legacy is available as a single and a double-disc, both carrying sequencings that mirror those on Nothing Has Changed (and both featuring a new mix of "Life on Mars?"). On the single disc, the first 12 songs are the same, then the back sequence is different, discarding "Absolute Beginners" and "Hallo Spaceboy" and concluding with "Where Are We Now?" and "Lazarus." Similarly, the double-disc has a nearly identical sequencing on its first disc – "Ashes to Ashes" and "Fashion" are swapped – with the differences arriving in the comp's final six songs, so Heathen's "Everyone Says Hi" is here, and this concludes with "Lazarus" and "I Can't Give Everything Away." In both cases, the Legacy sequencing is slightly better than that on Nothing Has Changed, since it winds up ending on the elegiac note that Bowie gave Blackstar. Still, it's splitting hairs: the 2016 and 2014 compilations are similar to each other, and they're also similar to the many Bowie comps that came before, and they're all just as likely to satisfy and pique interest.

The album found Morrison abandoning the abstract folk jazz compositions of Astral Weeks in favor of more formally composed songs, which he wrote and produced entirely himself. Its lively rhythm and blues/rock music was the style he would become most known for in his career. The music incorporated soul, jazz, pop, and Irish folk sounds into songs about finding spiritual renewal and redemption in worldly matters such as nature, music, romantic love, and self-affirmation.

The Beatles So much has been said and written about the Beatles – and their story is so mythic in its sweep – that it's difficult to summarize their career without restating clichés that have already been digested by tens of millions of rock fans. To start with the obvious, they were the greatest and most influential act of the rock era, and they introduced more innovations into popular music than any other group of their time. Moreover, they were among the few artists of any discipline who were simultaneously the best at what they did and the most popular at what they did. Relentlessly imaginative and experimental, the Beatles grabbed hold of the international mass consciousness in 1964 and didn't let go for the next six years, always staying ahead of the pack in terms of creativity and never losing the ability to communicate their increasingly sophisticated ideas to a mass audience.

The most distinctive thing about Double Fantasy, the last album John Lennon released during his lifetime, is the very thing that keeps it from being a graceful return to form from the singer/songwriter, returning to active duty after five years of self-imposed exile. As legend has it, Lennon spent those years in domestic bliss, being a husband, raising a baby, and, of course, baking bread.

"Greatest Hits" is a compilation album by Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, released in 1994. Certified Diamond by the RIAA, it is Seger's most successful album to date. In December 2009, Billboard and Nielsen SoundScan confirmed that with nearly nine million copies sold. Bob Seger's Greatest Hits was the decade's best-selling catalog album in the United States, even out-selling the Beatles' 1 and Michael Jackson's Number Ones. By September 2011, the album had sold a total of 9,062,000 copies in the United States.

Since he had joined Santana in 1972, keyboard player Tom Coster had been Carlos Santana's right-hand man, playing, co-writing, co-producing, and generally taking the place of founding member Greg Rolie. But Coster left the band in the spring of 1978, to be replaced by keyboardist/guitarist Chris Solberg and keyboardist Chris Rhyme. Despite the change, the band soldiered on, and with Inner Secrets, they scored three chart singles: the disco-ish "One Chain (Don't Make No Prison)" (#59), "Stormy" (#32), and a cover of Buddy Holly's "Well All Right" (#69), done in the Blind Faith arrangement. (There seems to be a Steve Winwood fixation here. The album also featured a cover of Traffic's "Dealer.") The singles kept the album on the charts longer than any Santana LP since 1971, but it was still a minor disappointment after Moonflower, and in retrospect seems like one of the band's more compromised efforts.

Grateful Dead So much more than just the archetypal jam band, the Grateful Dead grew to become an artistic and cultural institution that existed entirely on their own terms. While the band initially came out of a psychedelic revolution in the Bay Area's musically and chemically exploratory mid-'60s, they quickly evolved from their acid rock beginnings, incorporating elements of Americana and Bakersfield country into gently majestic albums like 1970's American Beauty. Their live shows were completely separate from their studio output, based on freeform improvisation borrowed from jazz and made up of extended performances and set list variations that ensured no two shows were exactly like. Though the band recorded only 13 studio albums between 1967 and 1989, an entire counterculture formed around their endless touring, and they even broke through to the mainstream with an unlikely radio hit in the MTV era.

"Goodbye Tiger" was Ralph’s fourth studio album and featured Down in the Lucky Country, Deep Water, Winter in Amsterdam, and of course – Goodbye Tiger.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Grateful Dead, the four original members — Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir — will reunite at Chicago's Soldier Field, nearly 20 years to the day of the last Grateful Dead concert, which took place at the same venue. “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead" will occur over three nights on July 3, 4, and 5, 2015, marking the original members' last-ever performance together. The band will be joined by Trey Anastasio (guitar), Jeff Chimenti (keyboards), and Bruce Hornsby (piano). The group will perform two sets of music each night.