Thursday, August 04, 2005

Cass Elliot The Solo Sessions 1968-1971 (heads up to new double CD collection)

Ava and Jess here and we're doing this entry together. Last week, we received an e-mail about an upcoming Cass Elliot collection and would have been happy to link to it but it's only come out this week.

It's entitled The Solo Sessions 1968-1971 and it's a double disc set ($39.98) offered by Hip-O Select. There are 5,000 copies so if you're interested, you should consider checking it out.

"Different" is one of the songs on the collection and that's the song that C.I. noted in a "Five CDs, Five Minutes." That's not been on a CD before. In addition the collection contains "three tracks that had never been released in any form: Cass' cover of Joni Mitchell's 'Sisotowbell Lane,' a version of John Sebastian's 'Darling Be Home Soon,' and the Cashman, Pistilli & West tune 'For As Long As You Need Me.' They are revolutionary, and stand proudly with anything Cass released."

The first disc contains twenty-three tracks and the second disc contains fifteen. If you've bought a Cass collection (and Jess has many), you don't have a collection like this. You get "Dream A Little Dream," "California Earthquake," "Make Your Own Kind of Music," "I Can Dream, Can't I," "The Good Times Are Coming," and all the rest you know from other collections. But you also get tracks that aren't available in the CD format elsewhere.

There are no live tracks. The set focuses on Cass' singles from 1968 to 1971.

The Mamas and the Papas and Cass, herself, are very popular with community members so we wanted to do a heads up. And if there's a visitor who stumbles upon this entry and wonders, "What does music have to do with anything?" you're at the wrong site. Music is very important to the community. (And here's but one example of Cass and the Mamas & Papas popping up in an earlier entry.)

We'd asked C.I. if it was okay to note the set here when it came out because The Third Estate Sunday Review only publishes on Sunday and were given permission (actually, what we got was, "Why are you even asking? Of course."). So that's your heads up.

If you're interested and can afford it, great. If you're interested but might need to save up (understandable), hopefully this gives you some time to do that. If you're a Cass fan or a Mamas and Papas fan you'll probably get a kick out of checking out the album online even if you're not planning to purchase it.