Rare music from three stars who died last year — Prince, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen — will come out next month for the 10th anniversary of Record Store Day, the celebration of vinyl’s rebirth.
Launched in 2007 by struggling US shops in hopes of stirring interest, Record Store Day has grown quickly as well as internationally as vinyl finds a renewed audience among collectors.
Some 350 limited-edition works will go on sale for the celebration on April 22, organizers announced Tuesday.
An original tribute album to Cohen, “Like a Drunk in a Midnight Choir,” will raise money for a cancer charity.
The album features covers of Cohen songs by artists including Joseph Arthur, the rich-voiced indie singer and painter, and psychedelic folk rocker Avi Buffalo.
Reissues from Prince — himself an avid record collector who frequented the Electric Fetus store in Minneapolis — will include 12-inch maxi-singles of six songs including “Pop Life” and “Sign o’ The Times.”
Twelve-inch maxi-singles are known for their high audio quality as the same amount of vinyl that ordinarily covers one side of an album goes to a single song.
Among the Record Store Day releases announced ahead of Tuesday are two albums by Bowie including a three-LP live work from 1974 called “Cracked Actor.”
Pink Floyd said Monday it will put out for the first time an early 15-minute version of “Interstellar Overdrive,” recorded in 1966 before the legendary band had a record deal.
In classical music, label Warner Classics will put out the first vinyl edition of cello virtuoso Rostropovich’s world premiere of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2, performed in 1967 with the composer in attendance.
The vinyl features an X-ray image of a bone and pelvis — a reference to bootleg records in the Soviet era that were made illicitly on hospitals’ leftover X-ray paper.
In one of the more unusual releases, folk star Iron and Wine took inspiration from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by hiding five golden tickets in his 1,200-issue run of “Archive Series Volume No. 3.”
The golden ticket will be a lifetime pass to his concerts, he told a Record Store Day news conference in New York.
“So if you buy 400 records, you might get one,” he said.
Vinyl sales in the United States and several European countries have reached levels not seen since the 1980s, but the sector remains a sliver in a music market in which CD sales are declining and streaming is soaring.
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