Ten Vinyl Releases Psychobabble Would Like to See in 2022

 It’s official: the Vinyl Revolution has been fought and won. 2021 was the first year since 1987 that the vinyl LP outsold the CD. Vinyl pressing plants can’t keep up with demand for new product. Consequently, 2022 should be another boon year for grooved plastic, but there are several platters I’d particularly like to see and hear in the coming year. Here are ten (actually, more than ten) of them: 

1. The Beatles’ Anthologies-Expanded

 

Despite a bit of a COVID-related hiccup in 2020, a big, beautiful box of Beatles has become a new annual tradition. This year saw the release of an anniversary set devoted to Let It Be, and the vinyl edition is the first of these to completely mimic the CD one, right down to the inclusion of a hardcover book. What will come next is a bit of a floating question mark. Logic dictates that now that Sgt. Pepper’s through Let It Be have received their obligatory deluxe boxes, series-mastermind Giles Martin will next skip back to the beginning and start remixing the early Beatles records. However, Martin has said that the fact that the early Beatles albums were recorded on two-track machines limits the options for remixing them (never mind that he has already remixed a bunch of pre-Pepper’s tracks for projects such as the remixed edition of Beatles 1 and the Yellow Submarine Songtrack). 

Review: 'Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia'

Prince was always an enigmatic artist. Check out the mass of speculations he unloads in "Controversy", a song written before he was even a house-hold name. Because it was sometimes hard to find the human behind all his supernatural abilities and purple sex-E.T. persona, reading testimonies from the people who had close encounters with him is always enlightening. Prince often isolated himself, but he could also be generous and disarmingly goofy. His tireless work ethic and the devotion he poured into his own music are legendary, but he was also a music fan and went out of his way to reveal his devotion to such seemingly unlikely artists as Squeeze and Suzanne Vega.

This is the Prince Paul Sexton aims to reveal in his new book Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia. Across seventeen short chapters, Sexton pulls back the veil on specific incidents in Prince's life as told by the people who knew him well, or in Vega's case, had a less intimate brush with him. There's a chapter on the note Prince sent to her to proclaim his love of "Luka". There are more revealing chapters on how Prince stepped out of a troubled home life to live with bassist and friend André Cymone, how he mentored protégés such as the Family, remade himself as a Jehovah's Witness on the recommendation of Family Stone bassist Larry Graham, and how he and engineer Susan Rogers (who also pens the foreword) called out any co-worker asleep on the job by photographing them with a giant toy penguin. 

Details such as these do not provide a full biography. Rather they round out existing biographies with additional details about Prince's background, beliefs, tastes, and personality. Because Prince was such a visual artist, a dazzling selection of photos of Prince defying gravity multiple times or jamming with Ron Wood, as well as images of his stage outfits, guitars, handwritten notes, and personal Bat-a-rang, further fill in the funky gaps.

Vinyl Releases Psychobabble Would Like to See in 2019

Psychobabble's 2019 resolution is to continue championing vinyl. With the current resurgence of whirling wax, there should be much to champion this year, and we can already bank on such enticing releases as reissues of every album by The Zombies and The Cardigans, as well as the likely continuation of annual vinyl reissues from such major leaguers as The Beatles (a 50th Anniversary Edition of Abbey Road) and Stones (ditto Let It Bleed). However, there are some vinyl releases we shouldn't necessarily expect in 2019 but Psychobabble would love to see nonetheless. Here are five varieties of them.

1. The Beatles' U.S. Albums

Box sets devoted to single albums has seemingly replaced the odder Beatles-related reissue projects of recent years, so while I once believed that vinyl reissues of the group's U.S. albums were a sure thing, I now have my doubts. Five years ago we received such a set on CD only, and purists took issue with the presentation since the stereo mixes on those CDs did not match the often reverb-drenched messes on Capitol's original records. With this year marking the 55th anniversary of The Beatles' invasion of the states, it would be a good time to finally put out these albums in their original vinyl states...complete with dodgy echo. 

2. Pink Floyd: The Early Singles

Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1990s!

Wow. A list of Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1990s. That’s so cool. It’s totally not like everyone else in the entire universe hasn’t already listed their 100 favorite songs of the nineties. Like anyone cares. Whatever. Lists are wack, but I don’t know… music is pretty cool. I mean, not when they’re like “Oooh, look at me! I’m a big rock star! My hair is so big and I screw so many groupies!” That is so eighties. But when they…I don’t know… kind of don’t care so much, I guess I’m kinda like, “That’s pretty cool. I don’t care so much either.” It’s like sometimes I think Kurt Cobain is singing about my life, you know? I don’t know what the fuck Bob Pollard is singing about half the time, but Guided by Voices rock so hard because Bob is like a forty-year-old schoolteacher or something, so it’s so ironic that he’s a rock star. And then there’s all the “Women in Rock” (I put that in quotes to show what I really think of the mainstream media’s “labels”) like Liz Phair, Tanya Donelly, Mary Timony, Juliana Hatfield, PJ Harvey, and like, all the others. They are sincerely hella cool. Sincerely! I’m not even being ironic about how totally dope they are. Don’t think I’m not being ironic? Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind. Then here’s your mom’s 100 favorite songs of the nineties.

100. “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox” by Guided by Voices

So we get started the way every party must get started…with a chant of “GBV! GBV! GBV!” Then Bob Pollard is all like, “Rock and Roll!” Then he’s like “This song does not rock,” which is so cool, because sincerely admitting that you rock is so lame! But the real irony is that “Over the Neptune” really does rock! It rocks like Cheap Trick (and not lame Cheap Trick, like “The Flame”). Then “Over the Neptune” morphs into “Mesh Gear Fox” like that cop in T2 morphs into water or whatever, and guess what…it stops rocking but it remains awesome as Guided by Voices get all psychedelic. It sounds like your dad’s best records… and Uncle Bob is like your dad’s only cool friend.

99. “I Wanted to Tell You” by Matthew Sweet