This incredibly diverse collection was Chicago’s sixth studio album and their final studio-recorded double album to date. Cited for its jazz excursions, Chicago VII reached No. 1 in the US and included three stand-out hits including Searchin’ So Long, Wishing You Were Here and the first single penned by trumpeter Lee Loughnane Call on Me, which reached No. 6 in the US.

String Driven Thing may have disintegrated when Chris and Pauline Adams departed, but Graham Smith didn't let that deter him. He rebuilt the band from the foundation up and shifted the focus from progressive folk to a more straight-ahead rock & roll format, a sonic sensibility helped along by vocalist Kim Beacon, whose Rod Stewart-styled vocals provided a front to the heavy-hooked guitar-driven songs. The new format didn't win many points with the band's old fans, but String Driven Thing's more pop-oriented sound fit perfectly with the mainstream marketplace's own drift away from the prog-tinged seas that the band once sailed so masterfully.

Let's Talk About Love is the fifth English-language studio album by Canadian singer Celine Dion, released on 14 November 1997, by Columbia/Epic Records. The follow-up to her commercially successful album Falling into You (1996), Let's Talk About Love showed a further progression of Dion's music. Throughout the project, she collaborated with Barbra Streisand, the Bee Gees, Luciano Pavarotti, Carole King, George Martin, Diana King, Brownstone, Corey Hart and her previous producers: David Foster, Ric Wake, Walter Afanasieff, Humberto Gatica and Jim Steinman. Let's Talk About Love includes Dion's biggest hit, "My Heart Will Go On". Written by James Horner and Will Jennings, and serving as the love theme for the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic, "My Heart Will Go On" topped the charts around the world, and has become Dion's signature song.

If Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is simply described in terms of its materials and organization – 11 chords followed by 11 pieces built on those chords – then it might seem utterly dry and monotonous. The actual music, though, is far from lackluster. When this recording was released in 1978, the impact on the new music scene was immediate and overwhelming. Anyone who saw potential in minimalism and had hoped for a major breakthrough piece found it here. The beauty of its pulsing added-note harmonies and the sustained power and precision of the performance were the music's salient features; and instead of the sterile, electronic sound usually associated with minimalism, the music's warm resonance was a welcome change. Yet repeated listening brought out a subtle and important shift in Reich's conception: the patterns were no longer static repetitions moving in and out of phase with each other, but were now flexible units that grew organically and changed incrementally over the course of the work.

Animals is the tenth studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd, released in January 1977. A concept album, it provides a scathing critique of the social-political conditions of late 1970s Britain, and presents a marked change in musical style from their earlier work. Animals was recorded at the band's studio, Britannia Row, in London, but its production was punctuated by the early signs of discord that several years later would culminate in keyboardist Richard Wright leaving the band. The album's cover image, a pig floating between two chimneys on Battersea Power Station, was conceived by bassist and writer Roger Waters, and photographed by long-time collaborators Hipgnosis.