Nebraska, the massively influential 1982 album from Bruce Springsteen, is the VMP Essentials Record of the Month for October 2022. Celebrating the record's 40th anniversary, our edition is half-speed mastered by Barry Grint at Alchemy Mastering at AIR and pressed on exclusive Black Smoke vinyl, with an art print by Justin A. McHugh.

Norah Jones is a multiple Grammy-winning singer and pianist who loves playing music with people, so she started her own podcast to do just that. On each episode of Playing Around, she sits down with a different guest for impromptu musical collaborations and candid conversation. Her guests come from all walks of life and every musical style, and you never know where the songs will take them. Music from her podcast is now available for the first time on Sea Blue vinyl for RSD Black Friday 2023.

Obscured by Clouds is the soundtrack to the Barbet Schroeder film La Vallée, and it plays that way. Of course, it's possible to make the argument that Pink Floyd's music of the early '70s usually played as mood music, similar to film music, but it had structure and a progression…

Lindsey Buckingham hadn't recorded a studio album with Fleetwood Mac in 16 years when Say You Will was released in April 2003. His partner, Stevie Nicks, had been missing in action from the group since 1990, and while both joined the reunited group in 1997 for a tour and live album (The Dance), not to mention Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, it had been a long, long time since the two made new music for the Mac…

One of the great concept albums by one of the great prog rock acts, Thick as a Brick found Jethro Tull making a big splash with the monolithic, one-track juggernaut of an album. Revisiting that classic work, frontman Ian Anderson takes to the stage in Iceland, performing the album, as well as its 2011 sequel, Thick as a Brick 2, in front of a live crowd on Thick as a Brick: Live in Iceland…

Its smirky title notwithstanding, The Worst of Jefferson Airplane provides a fine recap of the band's first six albums. Released in 1970 shortly before Marty Balin's initial departure from the band, the album marked not only the end of the decade but, unwittingly, the end of the group's most stable phase in terms of membership. The track selections are evenly divided among the first-generation albums; only the live Bless Its Pointed Little Head is represented by a single entry…

Jefferson Airplane's first live album demonstrated the group's development as concert performers, taking a number of songs that had been performed in concise, pop-oriented versions on their early albums – "3/5's of a Mile in 10 Seconds," "Somebody to Love," "It's No Secret," "Plastic Fantastic Lover" – and rendering them in arrangements that were longer, harder rocking, and more densely textured, especially in terms of the guitar and basslines constructed by Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady…

Although Free was never destined to scrape the same skies as Led Zeppelin, when they first burst out of the traps in 1968, close to a year ahead of Jimmy Page and company, they set the world of British blues-rock firmly on its head, a blistering combination of youth, ambition, and, despite those tender years, experience that, across the course of their debut album, did indeed lay the groundwork for all that Zeppelin would embrace…

Mike Harrison is the first solo album by Spooky Tooth principal lead singer Mike Harrison, released on Island Records in 1971.