PJ HARVEY, YOKO ONO, JEWEL, MADONNA, TINA TURNER

Happy new year!  Hope your January has started well.  I have spent the past week engaging in some stereotypical new year behaviour with the purchase of new notebooks and - for the first time ever - a desk planner, in the hope that this will help me juggle all the things I want to do in a more efficient manner.  Let's see...

I also purchased a record (starting the new year as I mean to go on!) - the Sparkle soundtrack by Aretha Franklin on ultra-clear vinyl.  It's an indies-only release as part of Rhino Records' Start Your Ear Off Right campaign.  According to some sources (Aretha's official Twitter included) the release date seems to have been last Friday, but my hunch is that it has been delayed in arriving into the UK.  Either way, Rhino's news story is saying it's out this coming Friday.  Let's see on that one too...

New out this week digitally is the second single from PJ Harvey's Let England Shake - Demos.  'The Words That Maketh Murder' in demo form includes a sampled master recording of Eddie Cochran's 'Summertime Blues' which is not on the finished album version.  I really love the insight into the recording process here.  The full demo album for Let England Shake is out on vinyl, CD and digitally on 28th January, along with a reissue of the studio album itself.

The Yoko Ono song 'Who Has Seen The Wind?' was released as a digital single last week.  Assuming I am putting two and two together and getting four, this coincides with the announcement of the forthcoming multi-artist compilation tribute album Ocean Child: Songs Of Yoko Ono that is curated by Death Cab For Cutie's Benjamin Gibbard, coming out next month to celebrate Yoko's 89th birthday on 18th February.  Artists involved that are of particular interest to this blog include Sharon Van Etten, U.S. Girls and Japanese Breakfast.  There's a podcast series about the album too.

And a recap of some of the things that came out while this blog was on a Christmas break:

Jewel was the winner of the US series of The Masked Singer and her cover version performances from the series, in which she featured as the character Queen Of Hearts, have been released as a digital EP of the same name.  Seven tracks in all, ranging from classic-classics like 'La vie en rose' and 'What's Going On' to modern-classics such as 'Born This Way' and 'Firework'.

Madonna's expanded digital single releases continue with 'Take A Bow'.  Originally released in December 1994, it was recently reissued in December 2021 as an 8-track collection, including the original track from the Bedtime Stories album plus remixes and instrumentals.

And "lots" of remixes of the Tina Turner theme tune for the 1995 Bond film Goldeneye (written by U2's Bono and The Edge) were made available digitally in December too.  

Oh, and an interesting article via Music Business Worldwide this week about how over 82% of the US music market is now made up of catalogue music rather than new releases.  Well I've always thought catalogue is where it's at...

With the start of the new year brings the start of a new playlist, expertly titled Reissues By Women 2022 Spotify Playlist.  As before, I'll be adding to this weekly to coincide with each blog post so do follow it if you like to get the automatic updates.

Have a good week, it's nice to be back...