Sweet Child, released in 1968, at the peak of Pentangle's career, is probably the most representative of their work. A sprawling two-record set, half recorded in the studio and half live at the Royal Festival Hall, showcases just how versatile Pentangle was in their unique brand of English folk, jazz, Celtic, blues, and pop styles. Some of the live covers are easily their finest performances. Furry Lewis' "Turn Your Money Green," sung by the delightful Jacqui McShee, swings sweetly, buttressed of course by John Renbourn and Bert Jansch's guitar tapestry. Charlie Mingus' "Haitian Flight Song" features a great solo by bassist Danny Thompson, who was easily one of the finest musicians to grace the instrument. The studio tracks are uniformly excellent as well, especially "The Time Has Come," which turns waltz time inside out. McShee, Renbourn, and Jansch all turn in career performances on this track. But these examples merely scratch the surface of Pentangle's peak. In all, Sweet Child is an awesome and delightful collection, and probably their finest hour.

Her career revitalized by the success of "Nobody Does It Better," the theme from The Spy Who Loved Me, Carly Simon returned to record-making with this classy Arif Mardin-produced session, backed by New York's best studio players (Steve Gadd, Eric Gale, Will Lee, Richard Tee, David Sanborn, the Brecker Brothers, etc.). Simon reached the Top Ten with "You Belong to Me," a collaboration with Michael McDonald that showed both off at their best, and the album's other Top 40 single was another duet with husband James Taylor on the old Everly Brothers hit "Devoted to You." Taylor also turned up writing and singing elsewhere to good effect. But what really made the album a winner was that Simon had had a couple of years to write some strong songs in her unflinching, reflective style, and she continued to explore the loves and mores of her age and class movingly.

John Fogerty pulled himself out of the game sometime after his 1976 album Hoodoo failed to materialize and he sat on the bench for a full decade, returning in the thick of the Reagan era with Centerfield in 1985. For as knowingly nostalgic as Centerfield is, deliberately mining from Fogerty’s childhood memories and consciously referencing his older tunes, the album is steeped in the mid-‘80s, propelled too often by electronic drums – the title track has a particularly egregious use of synthesized handclaps – occasionally colored by synths and always relying on the wide-open production that characterized the ‘80s…plus, there’s no denying that this is the work of a middle-aged baby boomer, romanticizing TV, rockabilly, baseball, and rock & roll girls. Since Fogerty always romanticized a past he never lived, these sepia tones suit him but it also helps that he’s written a clutch of terrific songs…