Jim Ford only released one album, 1969’s Harlan County, during his life but he had plenty of stray singles that accumulated over the years. Most of these found their way onto Bear Family’s 2007 release The Sounds of Our Times, which reissued the full Harlan County album, along with these 45 rpm rarities and unheard demo tapes. As Bear Family was compiling that superb disc, Ford revealed to journalist LP Anderson that there was a whole bunch of unheard tapes not sitting in vault but rather in a canvas bag in his trailer. The notoriously ornery, uncooperative Ford eventually agreed to release these tapes but he didn’t live to see the release of Point of No Return, a 2008 compilation of unheard songs from Jim Ford. Unheard doesn’t necessarily mean unknown, as this contains Ford’s own versions of “I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind” and “Harry Hippie,” songs popularized by his disciples Brinsley Schwarz and his friend Bobby Womack, who also cut the title track, “Point of No Return.” As to why these recordings — all full-blown studio recordings apart from the fragile, lovely acoustic “I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind,” one of Ford’s finest songs — weren’t released at the time, there are no specific reasons revealed in the liner notes. Yet the succession of stories of how Ford sold the same songs to five or six different publishers, how he demanded exorbitant fees to cut a country album, how he brawled his way through LA in the ’60s, and how he was incessantly asking for cash after the release of The Sounds of Our Times leave no doubt that he was one difficult SOB.

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Originally Momofuku was going to be released only on vinyl and digital download, an expression of Elvis Costello’s frustration in the State Of The Record Industry in 2008, but those plans soon changed, turning the album into a standard release yet not removing a sense of confusion surrounding its sudden appearance, as it arrived just after Costello publicly swore off ever recording again (or performing in the UK but that’s another matter for another time). The very title of the record was a source of mystery, as it was suggested that it could perhaps be named after David Chang’s string of NYC restaurants, but Costello clarified the situation by explaining that he Chang shared a similar love of Momofuku Ando, the man who invented cup noodle.

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Dallas Frazier is known as a songwriter whose tunes were recorded by George Jones, Charlie Rich, the Oak Ridge Boys, and the Hollywood Argyles, who gave Frazier his first success by turning “Alley Oop” into a hit in the early ’60s. He also had a recording career, which is where he debuted perhaps his best-known song “Elvira,” later cherry-picked by Rodney Crowell for his debut album and then turned into a smash country crossover in the early ’80s by the Oak Ridge Boys. His songs — not just this pair, but “Mohair Sam,” “There Goes My Everything,” “Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” and “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road,” among others — were well-known, but his own records weren’t, and they remained unheard until Raven issued Frazier’s two albums for Capitol, 1966’s Elvira and its 1967 follow-up Tell It Like It Is!, as a two-fer in February, adding three singles (”Tennessee Sue,” “King of the Jungle,” “Make Believe You’re Here with Me”) to fill out the CD. This is a major reissue as it offers a case that Frazier was as distinctive a musician as he was a writer, cutting albums that hold their own with Charlie Rich’s funky country-soul for Smash and Epic, as well as Elvis’ 1968 comeback.

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Like many old rock & rollers, Tom Petty decided to get the band back together after taking a leisurely stroll through his back pages. Prompted by his Runnin’ Down a Dream project — a four-hour Peter Bogdanovich documentary supplemented by a coffee table book — Petty began thinking about his first band Mudcrutch, the Southern rock outfit he had before the Heartbreakers that featured Tom Leadon, brother of Eagle Bernie, on lead guitar. Formed in Florida in 1970, Mudcrutch ambled out to Los Angeles four years later but they fell apart not long afterward, never recording more than a handful of singles and demos, several of which — including the original version of “Don’t Do Me Like That” — later surfaced on Petty’s 1995 box Playback. Mudcrutch morphed into the Heartbreakers not long after the breakup, retaining guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, who joined after Leadon’s 1972 departure, and as Campbell and Tench remain Petty’s lieutenants to this day, even appearing on his solo albums without the Heartbreakers, the question is why would he bother reuniting Mudcrutch when he’s working with two-thirds of the same band?

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Mystery burns at the heart of Portishead, lurking deep within their music and their very image. From the outset they seemed like an apparition, as if their elegant debut Dummy simply materialized out of the ether in 1994, as their stately blend of looped rhythms, ’60s soundtrack samples and doomed chanteuse vocals had only a tenuous connection to such Bristol compatriots as Massive Attack and Tricky. Soon enough, Portishead’s unique sound was exploited by others, heard in swank clubs and high-end dinner parties on both sides of the Atlantic, a development that the trio of Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley bristled at instinctively, recoiling into the darker corners of their sound on their eponymous 1997 sophomore album before fading back into the ether leaving no indication when they were coming back, if ever. Eleven years later they returned, seemingly suddenly, with Third, supporting the album with candid interviews that lifted the veil from their personality, yet the mystery remained deeper than ever within their gorgeous, unsettling music.

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All through her career, it has been impossible to divorce Madonna’s music from her image, as they feed off each other to the point where it’s hard to tell which came first, the concept or the songs. Glancing at the aggressively ugly cover to Hard Candy — its blistering pinks and assaultive leather suggesting a cheap bottom barrel porno — it’s hard not to wish that this is the one time Madge broke from tradition, offering music that wasn’t quite as garish as her graphics. That is not the case. Hard Candy is all brutal hard edges and blaring primary colors, a relentlessly mercenary collection of cold beats and chilly innuendo. Sex has always been a driving force for Madonna, but she’s never been as ruthlessly pornographic as she is here, not even when she cut Erotica as a companion to her soft-core coffee table book Sex back in 1992. For all of its carnality Erotica was coy, belonging to the classic burlesque teasing tradition, but Hard Candy is utterly modern, a steely sex album for the age of Cialisis. This new millennium is also an era where Top 40 has pretty much ceased to exist and a pop artist as sharp as Madonna knows this, so she has abandoned the idea of a big crossover hit – the kind that Erotica courted with such gorgeous, shimmering adult contemporary ballads as “Rain” and “Bad Girl” – and pitches Hard Candy directly toward her core audience of club-conscious, fashion-forward trend-setters.

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This week, Rhino Records finally delivered something that many rock & roll fans had been dreaming about for years: remastered, expanded reissues of the Replacements’ Twin/Tone albums. Their four Reprise albums will follow this fall, but the Twin/Tone LPs — 1981’s Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, 1982’s Stink, 1983’s Hootenanny, and 1984’s Let It Be — were in greater need of such treatment and they’re also where much of the band’s legacy lies, so it’s a thrill to have these records finally out in the deluxe editions they deserve.

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Hard as it may be to believe, but Paul Davis — a soft-rock singer/songwriter who passed way on April 22 at the age of 60 — ranks high among the most successful singles artists on the Billboard charts, an achievement he rarely receives any credit for. Then again, Davis was so easy-going he tended to glide under the radar — his soft rock is so soft it didn’t command attention. Instead, it soothed, without ever seeming saccharine, even as synthesizers started to creep into his warm grooves in the early ’80s.

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