World
Here you'll find album stories, birthdays, and anniversaries from musicians working outside the English-language mainstream, along with vinyl reissue news as it appears. This is a genre where reissue labels do much of the heavy lifting: names like Analog Africa, Strut, and Awesome Tapes From Africa built their catalogs by tracking down and repressing recordings from regional scenes that rarely had wide international distribution. The stories here follow specific musicians, labels, and recording scenes from around the world, and note why a given reissue matters to collectors looking past the more familiar corners of the record shop.
51 STORIES
Why Did Barbra Streisand Make Her Strangest Album?
Barbra Streisand released her fourteenth studio album on November 2, 1973. CBS steered her away from classical collaborators toward world music and kitchen utensils.
· 3 min read
How Did Aya Nakamura's Second Album Change French Pop?
Aya Nakamura's second album, Nakamura, arrived on November 2, 2018, via Rec. 118 and Warner Music France and turned the French-Malian singer into one of French music's most visible voices.
· 3 min read
Kate Bush: How The Red Shoes Turned Loss Into Her Boldest Album
Kate Bush released The Red Shoes on November 1, 1993. The twelve-track album was written and produced over three years in which she lost her mother and her guitarist.
· 4 min read
How Madness Rebuilt Wonderful After Eleven Years of Silence
Madness released Wonderful on November 1, 1999, their first studio album in eleven years. It was also the first with the classic seven-piece lineup since Keep Moving in 1984.
· 3 min read
How Bob Marley Rebuilt the Wailers on Natty Dread
Bob Marley released Natty Dread on October 25, 1974, the first Wailers album without Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, with all songs written by Marley.
· 4 min read
Fishmans: How One Song Became an Album
Fishmans released Long Season on Polydor Records on October 25, 1996. The 35-minute album was built from a single composition that grew out of the September single "Season."
· 3 min read
How Did Clean Bandit's Rockabye Survive Its Own Battle?
The song nearly tore Clean Bandit apart before anyone outside a London studio heard it. The British group had recorded a track about a single mother fighting fo…
· 4 min read
Snoop Dogg Turned a Local Tape Into a Hip-Hop Empire
Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. cut a four-song demo at VIP Records in Long Beach that reached Dr. Dre and led to Death Row, Doggystyle and a career of more than 35 million records sold.
· 4 min read
How Madness Turned One Step Beyond Into a Debut Classic
Madness released their debut album One Step Beyond… on 19 October 1979 through Stiff Records. The label took a chance on the band's rowdy take on a Prince Buster ska instrumental.
· 4 min read
The Wailers' Burnin' and the Last Stand of a Trio
The Wailers released Burnin' on October 19, 1973, the final album by Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer as a trio before they split for solo careers.
· 4 min read
How Did Amr Diab Conquer the World with One Song?
Amr Diab, born in Port Said on 11 October 1961, turned Nour El Ain into the first Arabic pop record to travel far beyond the Arabic-speaking world.
· 4 min read
Lionel Richie's Can't Slow Down: Five Singles, One Empire
Lionel Richie's second solo album Can't Slow Down, released on Motown on 14 October 1983, turned eight songs into five American top-10 singles.
· 3 min read
Chucho Valdés and the Sound His Father Left Behind
Chucho Valdés began his first recording sessions in Havana in January 1964, four years after his father Bebo left Cuba and fell silent for three decades.
· 4 min read
Jacques Brel Left the Stage at His Peak
Jacques Brel quit the stage in 1966 at the height of his fame, moved into film, and died on 9 October 1978 at the age of 49.
· 3 min read
How Johnny Nash Found His Clearest Sound in Jamaica
Johnny Nash was a Houston-born singer once marketed as a rival to Johnny Mathis. He found his own sound in Jamaica by signing Bob Marley and the Wailers and recording rocksteady grooves in Kingston.
· 3 min read
How Gwen Stefani Became the Queen of Confessional Pop
Gwen Stefani went from sharing a microphone in her brother's Fullerton ska band to a solo career that Rolling Stone labelled the queen of confessional pop.
· 3 min read
How Sinéad O'Connor Tore Up Her Own Career on Live TV
Sinéad O'Connor tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. She had just sung Bob Marley's 'War' a cappella, changing one word to accuse the church of child abuse.
· 4 min read
What Is Youssou N'Dour's Mbalax?
Youssou N'Dour helped invent mbalax, the dense Senegalese dance sound that carried his voice from Dakar clubs to global radio.
· 5 min read
Why did Udo Jürgens walk away from schlager?
Udo Jürgens, born in 1934 in Klagenfurt, rose from a Carinthian castle to become a defining figure of German-language pop. He reshaped schlager with jazz and chanson influences.
· 4 min read
Why Did Tim Maia Turn Brazilian Soul Into a Religion?
Tim Maia, born Sebastião Rodrigues Maia in 1942, brought soul to Brazilian music with a force that reshaped the country's sound. His catalog became a lasting legacy.
· 4 min read
Nolwenn Leroy Is 44 and Still Singing in Four Languages
Nolwenn Leroy, born in Brittany in 1982, became a French folk-pop star after winning Star Academy. Her album Bretonne sold over a million copies.
· 3 min read
Lata Mangeshkar: The Barefoot Voice That Outlasted a Century
Lata Mangeshkar, born in 1929 in Indore, built a seven-decade career as India's most prolific playback singer. She recorded in over thirty-six languages while keeping a barefoot ritual in the studio.
· 3 min read
Peter Gabriel Followed So With an Album of Fractures
Peter Gabriel's sixth studio album Us arrived on 28 September 1992. It is a fractured follow-up to So that maps his divorce and family distance through seven-minute songs.
· 3 min read
Jovanotti: The Typo That Named a Chameleon
Lorenzo Cherubini, born in Rome in 1966, built his career as Jovanotti after a nightclub marquee misspelled his stage name. The typo turned into a chameleon identity.
· 4 min read