[Darren H]

I picked up a copy of Cockburn's latest after work yesterday. I haven't listened to it enough to comment on the songs themselves, but I did do 30 minutes or so of "serious" listening (alone, in the dark, at an appropriate volume on my main system) and I'm very disappointed by this mix. I'm always horrible when it comes to writing about the way things sound, but to my ears this album seems unusually compressed and muddy. It was so blaring, in fact, that I stopped and spun some of my old standard reference discs to make sure that my system wasn't out of whack. Side-by-side, the new album absolutely pales in comparision with The Charity of Night.

Am I alone here?

[Philip Hamm]

No, you're not alone. It does sound "modern" though. Hey at least it's better than the megacompressed "Breakfast In New Orleans....".

Great songs, though. And Sam Phillips doing backing vocals again, woohoo!

Looking back on Cockburn's history, production quality has been -very- hit-or-miss, with some beautifully recorded gems like "Circles in the Stream" and some really poor sounding messes like "World of Wonders" (my second favorite BC album despite the poor production) and "Breakfast... Dinner".

I wish he'd work with T-Bone Burnett more.