Toby Hay
New Music For the 6 String Guitar
(The state51 Conspiracy)
★★★★

SINCE his 2019 album New Music For The 12 String Guitar, Radnorshire-based guitar player Toby Hay has been busy, recording collaboration albums with fellow guitar master Jim Ghedi and bassist Aiden Thorne, completing a masters in Music & The Environment at the University of the Highlands and Islands — and continuing to run his own record label.

Recorded on “Curlew,” a customer built six-string acoustic guitar, his new solo album was made over three days at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios.

The sound is crystal clear and his playing, informed by the natural world, magnificent, conjuring up a delightful sense of rural freedom and calmness. He crafts a shimmering intro on Celyn, while Walks Downhill is imbued with a wonderful lightness and positivity. Closing with the Scottish traditional tune The Parting Glass, it’s another inspired instrumental set from Hay.

Bruce Springsteen
Tracks II: The Lost Albums
(Columbia)
★★★★★

WITH 66 songs, the first Tracks box set in 1998 was a huge archive of outtakes from Bruce Springsteen’s iconic musical career. Tracks II is even bigger with 82 songs recorded between 1983 and 2018, the music organised into seven lost albums, with some even mixed for a release that never happened.

Full of orchestra-drenched torch songs paying homage to American pop standards, Twilight Hours from the late 2010s is a particular highlight, as is L.A. Garage Sessions ’83, showing just how prolific The Boss was between Nebraska and his era-defining Born In The USA. Oh, and don’t forget the Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions from 1994.

You get the picture — it’s an awesome treasure trove. Though the full package is very expensive (£230 for CDs, £280 for vinyl), there is a single record of highlights being released too.

Bonnie Dobson & The Hanging Stars
Dreams
(Loose)
★★★

NOW 84 years old, Canadian folksinger Bonnie Dobson played alongside Bob Dylan and Paul Simon in Greenwich Village during the 1960s, gaining attention (and lots of covers) with her anti-nuclear song Morning Dew.

Apparently she has been hooking up with various London musicians since performing at the Meltdown Festival in 2007, which leads us to Dreams, her new album with Walthamstow’s The Hanging Stars.

It feels like a natural pairing, Dobson’s impressively strong vocals complimented by the band’s country-folk. It works best when they pick up the pace and let loose a little, like on the country ramble Stay With Me Tonight.

Closing the set, the big autobiographical title track finds the narrator dreaming of returning to Canada to see friends and family. “You can’t go back, no you can’t go back, not even in your dreams,” she laments.