Eric Clapton's Crossroads Festival, which features world-class guitar players from all over the globe and has been held every three years since 2004, works as a fundraiser for the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, a treatment and educational center Clapton founded in 1998 to help people suffering from chemical dependency. The first three concerts were single-day outdoor events held in Dallas in 2004, and in Chicago in 2007 and 2010, with the fourth, the concert represented by this two-disc set, moving indoors to Madison Square Garden in New York and expanding to two nights in 2013…

At first, Fate of Nations seems so light and airy that it slips away through the layers of acoustic guitars, violins, and keyboards. Upon further listenings, more textures appear, and the album gains a calm sense of tension and reflectiveness…

The posthumously assembled ten-track outtakes collection The Sky Is Crying actually proves to be one of Stevie Ray Vaughan's most consistent albums, rivaling In Step as the best outside of the Greatest Hits collection. These songs were recorded in sessions spanning from 1984's Couldn't Stand the Weather to 1989's In Step and were left off of the LPs for whatever reason (or, in the case of Soul to Soul's "Empty Arms," a different version was used)…

A one-time event stemming from an offer to percussionist Guy Evans to do anything he wanted at the Union Chapel in London. An idea to collaborate with Peter Hammill on a variety of semi- improvisational material partly built on samples of Hammill's music soon expanded to incorporate more traditional performance ideas as well as connections to Evans' own colleagues in the Echo City troupe…

Lixx Array was one of those bands who seemingly had everything it took to be successful on the Sunset Strip…except timing. These California boys had the look, the style, the overall sound, but just not the luck. Having released their first single in 1983 and then slugging it out for the next nine or ten years, it would seem that this band, which was certainly better than a lot of those who snagged record deals, would have gotten a shot, but it simply was not to be…

"Angie" is a song by the rock band The Rolling Stones, featured on their 1973 album Goats Head Soup…

A rare snowy day in Nashville, Tennessee set the stage for an even rarer event an intimate concert by rock icon Robert Plant at the War Memorial Auditorium. Performing with his new, Grammy-nominated group aptly titled the Band of Joy (which includes fellow luminaries Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin), Plant played both Led Zeppelin classics and new songs that continue to have an impact on the music scene today…

Stormwatch is the album that they often call the third of the Tull folk rock trilogy and after Songs From The Wood and Heavy Horses (and their subsequent five star extended version in this series) it has a hard job to do…

The Crossroads Guitar Festival is a series of music festivals and benefit concerts founded by Eric Clapton. The festivals benefit the Crossroads Centre founded by Eric Clapton, a drug treatment center in Antigua. The concerts showcase a variety of guitarists, selected by Eric Clapton personally. To the 2007 audience, Clapton declared that each performer was one of the very best, and had earned his personal respect…

After two albums of muted, mature jazz-inflected pop, the last being an explicit album about death, Sting created his first unapologetically pop album since the Police with Ten Summoner's Tales. The title, a rather awkward pun on his given last name, is significant, since it emphasizes that this album is a collection of songs, without any musical conceits or lyrical concepts tying it together…

As the saying goes: not all that glitters is gold. But then again, not all that is gold necessarily glitters. It was this idea that struck Finnish singer Tarja Turunen as she began work on her seventh solo album, “In The Raw”. “Gold - we think - is something polished and perfect, sophisticated, a luxury, but in its natural state, it’s a raw element”, explains Tarja…

Stevie Ray Vaughan had always been a phenomenal guitarist, but prior to In Step, his songwriting was hit or miss. Even when he wrote a classic modern blues song, it was firmly within the genre's conventions; only on Soul to Soul's exquisite soul-blues "Life Without You" did he attempt to stretch the boundaries of the form. As it turns out, that was the keynote for In Step, an album where Vaughan found his own songwriting voice, blending blues, soul, and rock in unique ways, and writing with startling emotional honesty…

Ziggy Stardust wrote the blueprint for David Bowie's hard-rocking glam, and Aladdin Sane essentially follows the pattern, for both better and worse. A lighter affair than Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane is actually a stranger album than its predecessor, buoyed by bizarre lounge-jazz flourishes from pianist Mick Garson and a handful of winding, vaguely experimental songs…