"Marking the 50th anniversary of the album's release, John Prine offers a chronicle of the singer-songwriter's roots in Middle America, a soulful framework filled with rich imagery and unique perspectives. John Prine's time in Chicago is often regarded as a footnote in his larger biography, which discounts its deep and lasting influence. Through a series of original interviews, exhaustive research and personal insight, author Erin Osmon, for the first...

Smile is not merely a great unfinished album, but a living work of art that is all at once expansive, indeterminate, and resolutely pop. In the early 1960s, The Beach Boys rose from the suburbs of Hawthorne, California to become emissaries of a post-war American dream that fused middle-class aspiration and mobility with images of youth. Led by dream master Brian Wilson, their music gave voice to a Southern California mythos and compelled an audience...

"While hip-hop was already calcifying its tropes of steely machismo and aspirational fantasy, Bizarre Ride was a pure distillation of the average hip-hop listener's actual lifestyle-the joys and sorrows of four guys who were young, broke, sexually frustrated, and way too clever for their own good. A touchstone for Kanye West, Drake, Lil B and a whole generation of off-center MCs, Bizarre Ride sketched out a whole strata of emotions that other rappers...