{"id":54176,"date":"2025-12-19T15:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T15:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/19\/the-best-reissues-of-2025\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T15:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T15:14:11","slug":"the-best-reissues-of-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/19\/the-best-reissues-of-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Reissues of 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Must-hear boxes and archival sets from Dylan, Springsteen, Sly Stone, and more<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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\n\tIn the age of streaming, reissues are literally a volume business. Of 2025\u2019s 10 best archival collections and anniversary editions, five box sets, in their super-deluxe iterations, have 37 CDs among them. But they also come in cost-conscious variations, and everything here has a story.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFull disclosure: I contributed essays \u2014 with new research and interviews \u2014 for Buckingham Nicks<\/em> and the Jimi Hendrix release. But liner notes, like everything else I write, are journalism. And I have covered most of the artists and original records here, over the years. What follows are the 10 best reissues of 2025 because of the music \u2014 and stories \u2014 inside.<\/p>\n
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PHOTOGRAPHS IN ILLUSTRATION<\/p>\n
Danny Clinch; Don Hunstein\/Sony Music Entertainment; PL Gould\/IMAGES\/Getty Images; Baron Wolman<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Sly and the Family Stone, \u2018The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967\u2019 <\/em>(High Moon)<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
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\n\tBefore he blew up Woodstock, took soul to the future on 1970\u2019s There\u2019s a Riot Goin\u2019 On,<\/em> and met the black hole of drugs and paranoia that Questlove coined \u201cThe Burden of Black Genius,\u201d Sly Stone was a dance-floor journeyman, leading the Family Stone (before Sister Rose) in a 1966-67 residency at this Bay Area nightspot. A surprisingly sharp recording from one night is heavy on bread-and-butter covers (Otis Redding, Joe Tex, the Four Tops). But \u201cI Ain\u2019t Got Nobody,\u201d a Stone original, is funky self-assurance, the same mojo that powered the hits in the wings \u2014 until Stone, who died in June at 81, chose darkness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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H\u00fcsker D\u00fc, \u20181985: The Miracle Year\u2019 (Numero Group)<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe Minnesota speed demons were in roaring form and career flux \u2014\u00a0closing out their indie-punk purism at SST, about to sign with Warner Bros. \u2014 on these stage dates: a January 1985 rave-up at First Avenue in Minneapolis, plus hot shots from the H\u00fcskers\u2019 touring that fall. Velocity can trump coherence \u2014 hardly a problem amid the thrill of it all. But five songs from Salt Lake City are a scalding preview of the pop contours on 1986\u2019s Candy Apple Grey,<\/em> while a hometown-encore streak of Byrds and Beatles covers shows off the Sixties-garage classicism always at the heart of the din.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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The Jimi Hendrix Experience, \u2018Bold as Love\u2019 (Experience Hendrix\/Legacy)<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
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\n\tMostly cut in a two-week rush to make a U.K. Christmas release, Jimi Hendrix\u2019s second album of 1967, Axis: Bold as Love,<\/em> is a record many people best know as the one between Are You Experienced?<\/em> and Electric Ladyland<\/em>. But Axis<\/em> is the guitarist at his most focused and musical, 13 tracks of psychedelic luxury rendered with hit-single concision and overt R&B roots. The unprecedented attraction here is the first takes and evolving arrangements never before heard outside Olympic Studios, including \u201cWait Until Tomorrow,\u201d with heightened soul-stomp guitar, and an already luminous Take Two of Hendrix\u2019s sublime ballad \u201cLittle Wing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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John & Yoko\/Plastic Ono Band,\u00a0\u2018Power to the People\u2019 (Universal)<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn 1972, this publication judged John Lennon and Yoko Ono\u2019s electric newspaper Some Time in New York City<\/em> \u201cartistic suicide,\u201d a post-Beatles low of \u201cawful\u201d songs and \u201cpatronizing\u201d activism. Power to the People<\/em> is producer Sean Ono Lennon\u2019s box-set redemption of the earnest rage and joy his parents felt over their first year as artists and immigrants in their adopted city. New mixes of the LP sessions and the comprehensive release of the 1972 One to One benefit shows at Madison Square Garden, Lennon\u2019s only full-length concerts as a solo artist, illuminate the vigorous collaboration with Elephant\u2019s Memory and the instant-karma wheel still turning in the songs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Bruce Springsteen, \u2018Tracks II: The Lost Albums\u2019 (Columbia)<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis was a toss-up: the bedroom outtakes and aborted electric sessions on Nebraska \u201982,<\/em> or these seven, previously unreleased albums from across the next four decades? It\u2019s all one odyssey as The L.A. Garage Sessions<\/em> maintains the solitude of Nebraska <\/em>while the writing heads to Born in the U.S.A. <\/em>(a solo \u201cMy Hometown\u201d). The 1995 stone-country detour, Somewhere North of Nashville,<\/em> is a rich, first run at the California-symphony sweep of 2019\u2019s Western Stars.<\/em> Inyo<\/em>, in turn, is a wounded beauty for this moment: 10 studies in migrant and Native American struggle and faith from the late Nineties, now reflecting a democracy in even more dire need of repair.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tLotti Golden was a precocious songwriting veteran of the New York hit factories when, at 19, she unleashed her inner Laura Nyro and Aretha Franklin on 1969\u2019s Motor-Cycle.<\/em> Produced by Four Seasons mastermind Bob Crewe and issued by Atlantic straight into the cut-out bin, the album is Golden\u2019s acid-soul memoir of her life and loving in the East Village, reporting from Avenue A like a tag team of the rock-opera Pete Townshend and a biker Joni Mitchell. Golden scored bigger later as a pop writer-producer. But with Motor-Cycle<\/em> back in print after 54 years, she keeps her real date with glory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Wilco, \u2018A Ghost Is Born (Expanded Edition)\u2019 (Nonesuch)<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
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\n\tWilco\u2019s 2004 masterpiece, its second in a row after singer-leader Jeff Tweedy\u2019s record-label wartime and art-pop searching on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,<\/em> was already in motion before the latter\u2019s official release. Blueprints from February 2002 of the Neu!-like stomp \u201cSpiders (Kidsmoke)\u201d and the ballad \u201cHummingbird\u201d are among the intriguing drafts, discarded treatments, and songs saved for later in this account of Ghost<\/em>\u2018s long, compelling genesis. Essential to the telling: a Boston show as Wilco take the album on tour with two new members, guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansome \u2014 a lineup that, in its 21st year, still tears up every stage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tFleetwood Mac was a blues band on life support when drummer Mick Fleetwood heard Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham\u2019s 1973 debut as romantic and creative partners, tying his group\u2019s fate to Nicks\u2019 vocal spell in \u201cCrying in the Night,\u201d the country-blues kicks in Buckingham\u2019s fingerpicking, and the power-ballad finale \u201cFrozen Love.\u201d Buckingham Nicks <\/em>died on arrival, but now sounds, after an eternity in collector purgatory, like it\u2019s always been ready for prime time, a perfectly-cut diamond of early-Seventies songcraft and natural, harmonizing bond. And here\u2019s sweet justice: The reissue debuted in the Top 20 of the Billboard<\/em> 200.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Bob Dylan, \u2018Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series Vol. 18 1956-1963\u2019 (Columbia\/Legacy)<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
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\n\tBefore he wanted to be Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan was an aspiring Fats Domino. This Book of Genesis installment in the Bootleg Series <\/em>\u2014 Dylan\u2019s New York evolution from Woody Guthrie imitator to the most original American folk singer and songwriter since his idol \u2014 opens with the bard on piano at 15, banging New Orleans R&B on a 1956 music-store acetate. The roots run long and deep after that in apartment, studio, and club tapes, Dylan chasing his muse through the public-domain song bag, on the way to the April 1962 debut of \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d at Gerde\u2019s Folk City. The ascent peaks with a 1963 show at Carnegie Hall, Dylan at 22, in absolute command of his scene \u2014 and ready to leave it behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tPatti Smith\u2019s 1975 debut needs no reintroduction. But this two-disc set, adding pre-LP demos and works-in-progress from the John Cale-produced sessions, charts in previously-unreleased detail the singer-poet\u2019s commitment to risk and wonder on Horses<\/em>: forged in the examples of Bob Dylan and William Blake, armed with her group\u2019s bar-band heroism. Horses<\/em> is a lifetime in the dreaming; Smith pulled the immortal opening lines from her 1970 poem \u201cOath.\u201d But there is the hard work of transcendence, too: the impatience to fly in a rousing \u201cGloria\u201d without drums; an electrifying \u201cBirdland\u201d with the words and incantation under construction. Horses <\/em>is the sound of Smith finding a voice and future in rock & roll. Hear how she got there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
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