Gone Digital: Send No Flowers, Lil’ Mo, John Anderson, The Bobbettes, and Andrew Gold
If it’s Tuesday, then it must be time for Gone Digital, our weekly look at five recent additions to Rhino’s digital catalog. As ever, the types of music we’ll be covering will be all over the place, but that’s Rhino for you: we’re all about variety!
• Send No Flowers, JUICE: EXPANDED EDITION (1996): If this British band had only emerged a few years earlier, there’s every chance that they’d be remembered today as one of the UK’s best entries into the grunge scene, but that musical ship had long since set sail for oblivion by then, causing Send No Flowers to meet the same – as just as equally undeserved fate. Recommended if you’ve ever looked a Bush album and said, “Awwwwww, shit, that’s my jam!”
• Lil’ Mo, MEET THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (2003): After scoring some major chart action with her debut album, 2001’s BASED ON A TRUE STORY, Lil’ Mo picked up a part-gig as an anchor for Baltimore radio station WXYV while working on her sophomore effort for Elektra. Although the album picked up airplay with singles like “4Ever” and “Ten Commandments,” it didn’t match the success of its predecessor, but critics mostly loved it, so we’d call that a win.
• John Anderson, CHEATIN’ SONGS: THE WARNER SINGLES (2020): Although he started entering the top-10 of Billboard’s Country Singles chart from the moment he released his self-titled debut album in 1980, it wasn’t until his fourth album, 1982’s WILD & BLUE, that he truly broke through as a mainstream country artist. For that, you can thank his #1 country single, “Swingin’,” which almost cracked the pop top-40, too. (It stalled at #43. ) With this compilation, you get a dozen top-10 country hits, including “Wild and Blue,” “Black Sheep,” “She Sure Got Away with My Heart,” “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I’m Gonna Be a Diamond Someday),” and more.
• The Bobbettes, MR. LEE: THE BEST OF THE BOBBETTES (2020): This girl group emerged from Harlem in 1955 and scored their first – and biggest – hit two years later with the song that provides this compilation with its title: “Mr. Lee.” While it’s not 100% comprehensive in terms of having all of the group’s chart hits, it’s the only proper compilation of their work on Spotify, which makes it a must-own for anyone who loves the girl-group sound. And just for the record, the Bobbettes did break up for a time, but they got back together at some point and were still doing gigs into the 2010s.
• Andrew Gold, LONELY BOY: THE ASYLUM YEARS ANTHOLOGY (2020): The importance of this man’s musical sensibilities on the L.A. pop-rock sound in the late ‘70s can’t be understated, yet somehow he’s often forgotten when it comes to the great pop songwriters of that decade. This compilation is a wonderful introduction to his work for those who feel as though they don’t know enough it, but it’s also pretty awesome for longtime fans, as it includes a number of alternate takes, outtakes, early versions, and live performances.
