Morrissey has always favored compilations, releasing such hodgepodges of singles, B-sides, and album tracks as Bona Drag and World of Morrissey, but the 19-track Suedehead: The Best of Morrissey is the first official "hits" collection he has released in his solo career…

The Man in Black: 1963-1969 is Bear Family's fourth box set of Johnny Cash recordings and the third in The Man In Black series. 1963-1969 picks up where the previous Man In Black box left off – in the beginning of the '60s, after Cash established himself as a hitmaker for Columbia…

Picking up where the previous set left off, The Man In Black: 1959-1962 collects all of the recordings Johnny Cash made for Columbia between '59 and '62; the only music that was left off are his historical albums, which Bear Family had already released on Come Along on Ride Train…

The Man in Black: 1954-1958 is a five-disc box set that includes everything Johnny Cash recorded for Sun Records, plus the fruits of his first year with Columbia Records. In addition to all of the classic singles – from "Hey Porter" to "Don't Take Your Guns to Town," they're all here – there is a wealth of unreleased material and alternate takes, including a disc that captures an entire recording session from his early days with Columbia…

When the Love Generation (which, truthfully, did no better with that emotion than any other generation) got its first real glimpse of soul giant Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 backed by Booker T. & the MG's, a powerhouse band if there ever were one, they saw love with a capital L, because Redding sang love songs like the world was about to end, wringing the emotion out of them like a soulful, urgent hurricane…

Leon Bridges' first strides as a retro-soul artist prompted comparisons to R&B legends like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. A singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Bridges performed in and around Fort Worth, Texas and stirred up music industry interest with analog recordings, produced by Justin Block and Austin Jenkins of White Denim, which were uploaded to his SoundCloud page. Signed to major-label Columbia, his first singles – including a rich ballad written about his mother – appeared in February 2015 with a sound that evoked mid- to late-'60s soul. The following month, Bridges caught more attention with a performance at the South by Southwest Festival, roughly 200 miles south of his home base. His debut album, Coming Home, was released in June 2015.

The Highwayman Collection gathers 20 tracks recorded during the supergroup's (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson) tenure with Columbia in the '80s and '90s. Included are the original versions of "Desperados Waiting for a Train," "Silver Stallion," and their signature song "Highwayman."

In the year before his death in the fall of 1973, Gram Parsons recorded two superb solo albums, and Warner Brothers has conveniently reissued them in their entirety on a single compact disc. Since many of the same musicians played on both G.P. (released in January of 1973) and Grievous Angel (which appeared in stores almost exactly a year later), the two albums flow together quite well as a single set…

Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton helped lay the groundwork for rock & roll in 1953 with her raw electric blues single "Hound Dog" (later covered by Elvis Presley). THE WAY IT IS finds Thornton performing at an L.A. rock club 16 years later, after the rock revolution she and her peers inspired had effectively usurped the blues as the music of the people…

Few bands have gotten as far in Nashville while displaying little if any concern for the conventions of Music City record making as the Mavericks, and since they reunited in 2012, they seem to realize there isn't much of a place for them on the radio in a market saturated by bro-country, so they've followed their own muse, which has served them quite well in the past…

The Byrds' second album, Turn! Turn! Turn!, was only a disappointment in comparison with Mr. Tambourine Man. They couldn't maintain such a level of consistent magnificence, and the follow-up was not quite as powerful or impressive. It was still quite good, however…

As Whiskeytown finally ground to a halt in the wake of an astonishing number of personal changes following Faithless Street (coupled with record company problems that kept their final album, Pneumonia, from reaching stores until two years after it was recorded), Ryan Adams ducked into a Nashville studio for two weeks of sessions with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings…

Like any Ryan Adams album, Love Is Hell comes with a back-story, one that is carefully calculated to construct the enfant terrible's self-myth. Love Is Hell was intended to be the official follow-up to 2001's Gold – the album that was not a collection of demos (that was 2002's Demolition), or the recorded-but-shelved albums 48 Hours or The Suicide Handbook, or even his alleged song-by-song cover of the Strokes' Is This It…

Easy Tiger has a "slow it down there, pal" undertone to its title – and who needs a word of caution other than Ryan Adams himself, who notoriously spread himself far and wide in the years following his 2000 breakthrough Heartbreaker. After celebrating his 30th birthday with a flurry of albums in one year, Adams decided to pull back, hunker down, and craft one solid album that deliberately plays to his strength…