Cassandra Wilson continues to move down a highly eclectic path on Belly of the Sun, the somewhat belated follow-up to Traveling Miles. While displaying a jazz singer's mastery of melodic nuance and improvisatory phrasing, Wilson draws on a variety of non-jazz idioms – roots music, rock, Delta blues, country, soul – to create a kind of earthy, intelligent pop with obvious crossover appeal. Her core band includes guitarists Marvin Sewell and Kevin Breit, who blend marvelously, Sewell mostly on mellow acoustic and Breit adding atmospheric touches on electric, 12-string, and slide guitars, as well as mandolin, banjo, and even bouzouki.

Innamoramento is the fifth studio album by Mylène Farmer, released on April 7, 1999. Very poetic, all texts were written by Mylène Farmer who also composed the music for five songs. The album deals with the singer's anxieties, such as pain, unhappy love, sexuality and the passage of the time. But as the album's title suggests, love is the central theme of the latter. The album is slower and with less rock sonorities than Anamorphosée. The sound is more techno-pop and intimate. In 2000, Innamoramento won a NRJ Music Awards in the category 'Francophone album of the year'.

Vocalist Asha Puthli was well-known in her native India before she moved to New York and made a splash in the jazz world. For her Western recording debut, Puthli lent her vocals to "What Reason Could I Give" and "All My Life," a pair of ballads on Ornette Coleman's 1971 Science Fiction LP. She recorded two LPs for Columbia, 1974's Asha Puthli and 1978's The Devil Is Loose, but success in America eluded her, even as she matured into a European chart mainstay. Puthli's popularity grew not in the U.S. but in Europe where she signed a record deal with CBS.

ABBA are a Swedish pop supergroup formed in Stockholm in 1972 by Agnetha Faltskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. The group's name is an acronym of the first letters of their first names. They became one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1974 to 1982. ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest 1974, giving Sweden its first triumph in the contest. They are the most successful group to have taken part in the competition. Estimates of ABBA's total record sales are over 380 million, making them one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

The Beginning of Survival is a whopping 16-track collection from Joni Mitchell's Geffen period, recorded between 1985-1998, and carefully chosen by the artist as "commentaries on the world in which we live."
The sequencing here is so meticulous and effective that The Beginning of Survival feels like a topical song cycle rather than a compilation. Tracks trace meaning and impression onto other tracks; they inform and elucidate themes of resistance in the face of the dark deluge that began the culture war in earnest during the 1980s, and which has come to signify the nature of American society in the 21st century with no signs of anything but further fragmentation…