Must-hear boxes and archival sets from Dylan, Springsteen, Sly Stone, and more
In the age of streaming, reissues are literally a volume business. Of 2025’s 10 best archival collections and anniversary editions, five box sets, in their super-deluxe iterations, have 37 CDs among them. But they also come in cost-conscious variations, and everything here has a story.
Full disclosure: I contributed essays — with new research and interviews — for Buckingham Nicks and the Jimi Hendrix release. But liner notes, like everything else I write, are journalism. And I have covered most of the artists and original records here, over the years. What follows are the 10 best reissues of 2025 because of the music — and stories — inside.
PHOTOGRAPHS IN ILLUSTRATION
Danny Clinch; Don Hunstein/Sony Music Entertainment; PL Gould/IMAGES/Getty Images; Baron Wolman
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Sly and the Family Stone, ‘The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967’ (High Moon)
Before he blew up Woodstock, took soul to the future on 1970’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and met the black hole of drugs and paranoia that Questlove coined “The Burden of Black Genius,” Sly Stone was a dance-floor journeyman, leading the Family Stone (before Sister Rose) in a 1966-67 residency at this Bay Area nightspot. A surprisingly sharp recording from one night is heavy on bread-and-butter covers (Otis Redding, Joe Tex, the Four Tops). But “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” a Stone original, is funky self-assurance, the same mojo that powered the hits in the wings — until Stone, who died in June at 81, chose darkness.
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Hüsker Dü, ‘1985: The Miracle Year’ (Numero Group)
The Minnesota speed demons were in roaring form and career flux — closing out their indie-punk purism at SST, about to sign with Warner Bros. — on these stage dates: a January 1985 rave-up at First Avenue in Minneapolis, plus hot shots from the Hüskers’ touring that fall. Velocity can trump coherence — hardly a problem amid the thrill of it all. But five songs from Salt Lake City are a scalding preview of the pop contours on 1986’s Candy Apple Grey, while a hometown-encore streak of Byrds and Beatles covers shows off the Sixties-garage classicism always at the heart of the din.
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The Jimi Hendrix Experience, ‘Bold as Love’ (Experience Hendrix/Legacy)
Mostly cut in a two-week rush to make a U.K. Christmas release, Jimi Hendrix’s second album of 1967, Axis: Bold as Love, is a record many people best know as the one between Are You Experienced? and Electric Ladyland. But Axis is the guitarist at his most focused and musical, 13 tracks of psychedelic luxury rendered with hit-single concision and overt R&B roots. The unprecedented attraction here is the first takes and evolving arrangements never before heard outside Olympic Studios, including “Wait Until Tomorrow,” with heightened soul-stomp guitar, and an already luminous Take Two of Hendrix’s sublime ballad “Little Wing.”
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John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band, ‘Power to the People’ (Universal)
In 1972, this publication judged John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s electric newspaper Some Time in New York City “artistic suicide,” a post-Beatles low of “awful” songs and “patronizing” activism. Power to the People is producer Sean Ono Lennon’s box-set redemption of the earnest rage and joy his parents felt over their first year as artists and immigrants in their adopted city. New mixes of the LP sessions and the comprehensive release of the 1972 One to One benefit shows at Madison Square Garden, Lennon’s only full-length concerts as a solo artist, illuminate the vigorous collaboration with Elephant’s Memory and the instant-karma wheel still turning in the songs.
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Bruce Springsteen, ‘Tracks II: The Lost Albums’ (Columbia)
This was a toss-up: the bedroom outtakes and aborted electric sessions on Nebraska ’82, or these seven, previously unreleased albums from across the next four decades? It’s all one odyssey as The L.A. Garage Sessions maintains the solitude of Nebraska while the writing heads to Born in the U.S.A. (a solo “My Hometown”). The 1995 stone-country detour, Somewhere North of Nashville, is a rich, first run at the California-symphony sweep of 2019’s Western Stars. Inyo, in turn, is a wounded beauty for this moment: 10 studies in migrant and Native American struggle and faith from the late Nineties, now reflecting a democracy in even more dire need of repair.
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Lotti Golden, ‘Motor-Cycle’ (High Moon)
Lotti Golden was a precocious songwriting veteran of the New York hit factories when, at 19, she unleashed her inner Laura Nyro and Aretha Franklin on 1969’s Motor-Cycle. Produced by Four Seasons mastermind Bob Crewe and issued by Atlantic straight into the cut-out bin, the album is Golden’s acid-soul memoir of her life and loving in the East Village, reporting from Avenue A like a tag team of the rock-opera Pete Townshend and a biker Joni Mitchell. Golden scored bigger later as a pop writer-producer. But with Motor-Cycle back in print after 54 years, she keeps her real date with glory.
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Wilco, ‘A Ghost Is Born (Expanded Edition)’ (Nonesuch)
Wilco’s 2004 masterpiece, its second in a row after singer-leader Jeff Tweedy’s record-label wartime and art-pop searching on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was already in motion before the latter’s official release. Blueprints from February 2002 of the Neu!-like stomp “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” and the ballad “Hummingbird” are among the intriguing drafts, discarded treatments, and songs saved for later in this account of Ghost‘s long, compelling genesis. Essential to the telling: a Boston show as Wilco take the album on tour with two new members, guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansome — a lineup that, in its 21st year, still tears up every stage.
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Buckingham Nicks, ‘Buckingham Nicks’ (Rhino)
Fleetwood Mac was a blues band on life support when drummer Mick Fleetwood heard Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s 1973 debut as romantic and creative partners, tying his group’s fate to Nicks’ vocal spell in “Crying in the Night,” the country-blues kicks in Buckingham’s fingerpicking, and the power-ballad finale “Frozen Love.” Buckingham Nicks died on arrival, but now sounds, after an eternity in collector purgatory, like it’s always been ready for prime time, a perfectly-cut diamond of early-Seventies songcraft and natural, harmonizing bond. And here’s sweet justice: The reissue debuted in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200.
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Bob Dylan, ‘Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series Vol. 18 1956-1963’ (Columbia/Legacy)
Before he wanted to be Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan was an aspiring Fats Domino. This Book of Genesis installment in the Bootleg Series — Dylan’s New York evolution from Woody Guthrie imitator to the most original American folk singer and songwriter since his idol — opens with the bard on piano at 15, banging New Orleans R&B on a 1956 music-store acetate. The roots run long and deep after that in apartment, studio, and club tapes, Dylan chasing his muse through the public-domain song bag, on the way to the April 1962 debut of “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City. The ascent peaks with a 1963 show at Carnegie Hall, Dylan at 22, in absolute command of his scene — and ready to leave it behind.
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Patti Smith, ‘Horses (50th Anniversary)’ (Arista)
Patti Smith’s 1975 debut needs no reintroduction. But this two-disc set, adding pre-LP demos and works-in-progress from the John Cale-produced sessions, charts in previously-unreleased detail the singer-poet’s commitment to risk and wonder on Horses: forged in the examples of Bob Dylan and William Blake, armed with her group’s bar-band heroism. Horses is a lifetime in the dreaming; Smith pulled the immortal opening lines from her 1970 poem “Oath.” But there is the hard work of transcendence, too: the impatience to fly in a rousing “Gloria” without drums; an electrifying “Birdland” with the words and incantation under construction. Horses is the sound of Smith finding a voice and future in rock & roll. Hear how she got there.
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