One overriding impression emerges from Rhino’s new 10-disc Woodstock: Back to the Garden, 50th Anniversary Experience.

It isn’t that the music has aged badly. Those parts that seem to have weren’t considered all that good to begin with. Besides, there were mitigating circumstances: the era’s outdoor-concert technology, for example, and the fact that many of the performers, like much of the crowd, weren’t entirely sober.

The late boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter may not have committed the murders for which he was convicted in 1967, but plenty of evidence suggests that he did. 

And of the several good reasons not to invest in Columbia/Legacy’s new 14-disc Bob Dylan box, The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings, that one is the strongest.

Sanctified Soldiers for the Transfiguration of Light

Roy Ruiz Clayton

“Standing before you,” said Bruce Springsteen during his 2018 show Springsteen on Broadway, “is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had absolutely no personal experience. I made it all up.”

The Boss was referring to his penchant for writing songs from a blue-collar point of view despite his never having worked a day job, a penchant that he referred to as his “magic trick.” And he played the confession for laughs.  

When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

Billie Eilish

Although they were conceived with entirely different goals, the latest albums by Wynton Marsalis and the quartet led by his younger brother Branford illuminate two parts of the same quintessentially American narrative: jazz’s disreputable birth in the sweltering fleshpots of late-19th-century New Orleans and its maturation into a high art form befitting the toniest venues of the present. 

Deeper Roots: Where the Bluegrass Grows

Steven Curtis Chapman