Hooking up with regular Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard as the co-producer of this album proved to be just the trick for Ferry. Bete Noire sparkles as the highlight of Ferry's post-Roxy solo career, adding enough energy to make it more than Boys and Girls part two. Here, his trademark well-polished heartache strikes a fine balance between mysterious moodiness and dancefloor energy, and Leonard adds more than a few tricks that keep the pep up. Five out of the nine songs are Ferry/Leonard collaborations; all succeed, from "Limbo"'s opening punch and flow to the cinematic (and unsurprisingly French-tinged) feeling of the title track.

As Robert Fripp had done with King Crimson's first live LP, Earthbound (1972), USA is a single-disc concert package documenting the quartet during its 1974 swing through North America. As with its predecessor, USA was also issued as a sonic cenotaph of the concurrently defunct Krim. So insistent that the band would not be resurrected, Fripp concluded the LP's liner notes at the time with another three-letter epitaph: "R.I.P." The 1973/1974 King Crimson included the collective efforts of Fripp (guitar/Mellotron), David Cross (violin), John Wetton (bass/vocals), and Bill Bruford (drums/percussion).

Toby Keith jumped from Mercury to DreamWorks after his fourth album, Dream Walkin' and How Do You Like Me Now?!, his first effort for his new album, finds the singer/songwriter revived and refreshed, shaking loose some of the sleepiness of his two albums for Mercury. Not that he's given up slower tunes – he still has a keen ear for sensitive love songs and heartbreak sagas, manifesting in both the light, sweet "Heart to Heart (Stelen's Song)" and power ballads like "When Love Fades" – but there is a bit of a showy defiance here, best heard on the hit title track, "Die with Your Boots On" and the rocking "Country Comes to Town."

Released in December 1970, King Crimson's third studio album, Lizard, is often viewed as an outlier in the pioneering British prog outfit's nearly half-century discography. It's not easily grouped with 1969's stunning In the Court of the Crimson King debut and 1970 follow-up In the Wake of Poseidon, and along with 1971's Islands it's considered a transitional release on the band's path toward the relative stability of the Larks' Tongues in Aspic (1973), Starless and Bible Black (1974), and Red (1974) trilogy. Plus, the Lizard sessions were difficult and the core group lineup acrimoniously collapsed immediately afterward, as bandleader/guitarist Robert Fripp, with lyricist Peter Sinfield, continued brave efforts to save King Crimson from disintegrating as the group's lengthy history was just getting underway.

Compiled by Chris Squire (in case you're wondering how "The Fish" made it this far upstream), Classic Yes was Atlantic's initial attempt to distill the band's best music. The key to this collection is in the title: this is the band's "classic" music. Anything prior to The Yes Album is cut out, no attempt is made to salvage snippets from Relayer or Tales from Topographic Oceans; Drama and Tormato are dispensed with. What remains is what made this band great: the science fiction and fantasy-laced epics, the tangible wizardry of their arrangements, moments that crystallized the magical power of music, and two unreleased live tracks from 1978 that find the band tethered to the realm of mortals."

Flesh and Blood (stylized as Flesh + Blood) is the seventh studio album by the English rock band Roxy Music. Released in late May 1980, it was an immediate commercial success peaking at No. 1 in the UK for one week in June and then returned to the summit in August for another three weeks, in total spending 60 weeks on the albums chart in the United Kingdom. The album also peaked at No. 35 in the United States and No. 10 in Australia. The album was made after their drummer Paul Thompson had left the band, essentially making Roxy Music a three-piece band consisting of Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera.

Nancy Sandra Sinatra is an American singer and actress. She is the elder daughter of Frank Sinatra and Nancy (née Barbato) Sinatra, and is widely known for her 1966 signature hit "These Boots Are Made for Walkin". Other defining recordings include "Sugar Town", the 1967 number one "Somethin' Stupid" (a duet with her father), the title song from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, several collaborations with Lee Hazlewood, such as "Jackson", "Summer Wine" and her cover of Cher's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)".

Simon & Garfunkel's first masterpiece, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was also the first album on which the duo, in tandem with engineer Roy Halee, exerted total control from beginning to end, right down to the mixing, and it is an achievement akin to the Beatles' Revolver or the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, and just as personal and pointed as either of those records at their respective bests. After the frantic rush to put together an LP in just three weeks that characterized the Sounds of Silence album early in 1966, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme came together over a longer gestation period of about three months, an uncommonly extended period of recording in those days, but it gave the duo a chance to develop and shape the songs the way they wanted them.

Falling halfway between musical primitivism and art rock ambition, Roxy Music's eponymous debut remains a startling redefinition of rock's boundaries. Simultaneously embracing kitschy glamour and avant-pop, Roxy Music shimmers with seductive style and pulsates with disturbing synthetic textures. Although no musician demonstrates much technical skill at this point, they are driven by boundless imagination – Brian Eno's synthesized "treatments" exploit electronic instruments as electronics, instead of trying to shoehorn them into conventional acoustic patterns.

Taxi shows a mature Bryan Ferry, suave and controlled, very much in line with his general career from 1979 on. The choice of songs to cover doesn't make for any surprises – the same selections of classic rock, pop, and soul numbers dominate, with an interesting ringer here and there like "Amazing Grace." As with his other recent solo records, a cast of thousands supports him, ranging from the Grid's Richard Norris on synth programming to Brit guitar legends Robin Trower and Michael Brook, plus vocalist Carleen Anderson.

Good times have sunk into the marrow of Kenny Chesney’s bones, slowing down his metabolism, making him unlikely to kick up his tempos or turn up his amplifiers. Age slows you down but so do too many afternoons on the beach Chesney continues to romanticize, although not quite so much on 2010’s Hemingway’s Whiskey as he did on his last decade of records. Unlike its immediate predecessor, 2008’s Lucky Old Sun, Hemingway’s Whiskey isn’t simply lazy: it’s slow but it’s burnished and classy, not quite as literary as the Guy Clark title track might initially indicate, but surely handsome, its seamless weaving of guitars being the aural equivalent of high thread count sheets.