Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#728 in the Series) is The Shadows of Knight, Gloria There’s this great moment during the final encore of Rickie Lee Jones’ “Live at Red Rocks”: she and band are midway through an improvised-sounding reading of Van Morrison’s composition “Gloria” that, to these ears anyway bears as much homage to the Shadows of Knight as Morrison’s Them…and while the band vamps those three indelible chords, she tells the audience, “I was 12 when this song came out and I have never forgotten.  I will never forget!  That’s why I will never get old!”  And I’m like: how true that is! The Shadow’s “Gloria” debuted on the WLS Silver Dollar Survey in mid-February,...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#719 in the Series) is The Siegel-Schwall Band, The Siegel- Schwall Band  It seems like a contradiction in terms to use words like “joyous” and “blues” in the same sentence but this is a brilliant set of tunes that demands it.  Sad to say I never got to hear these guys live.  These sounds have seen me through ecstatic times and provided solace through some of the most grievous. It’s billed as a studio album but at least the first and last songs are obviously live recordings.  In any event, this is such a tight band I gotta believe everything else here was recorded essentially live and whole, without the benefit of...

    Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#643 in the Series) is Dan Fogelberg, Home Free Somehow it’s easier to believe its 40 years since the release of Dan Fogelberg’s inaugural album Home Free than to accept it’s also going on five years since the untimely passing of the Illinois’ native. Look “Dan Fogelberg” up in Wikipedia and you’ll read that Home Free met with a “lukewarm” response—but that’s not the way it was that fall in Champaign at a time when a college freshman could walk wide-eyed into the music store heaven known as Record Service and encounter a giant display in support of this album.  Suffice it to say it appeared they were buying and selling...