Box Set Round-Up: Hank Williams and Level 42

There’s a pair you’d never expect to see in the same title. A few bits of news around the way regarding a few box sets coming up. First up, Time-Life has got a really large box set of Hank Williams material coming out. The Complete Mother’s Best Recordings…Plus! is a 16-disc box set (including a DVD) of all Williams legendary, surviving recordings for Nashville radio station WSM (where he had his own show sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour).

These 72 acetates were recorded through 1951, two years before Williams died at just 29 years old, and famously rescued from a garbage bin in the 1970s and unreleased until 2008 and 2009, after years of legal wrangling between Williams’ estate and both PolyGram (owner of MGM Records, Williams’ label in life) and Legacy Entertainment (not the label, but a company which acquired the tapes). Time-Life did several box sets of some of the tracks, but this set will encompass all of that material.

Also, Hip-O has planned an August 3 release date for Living It Up, a four-disc box set by British pop act Level 42. The set includes two discs of all the band’s single A-sides, another disc of mostly-unreleased rarities and a set of brand-new, acoustic recordings of the band’s best-loved tunes.

After the jump, take a look at the cover art and track listing, straight from the band’s official Web site.

The Setlist Situation, Part II

A huge debt to Vintage Vinyl News for posting the track lists of the upcoming batch of Setlist compilations from Legacy Recordings.

If you haven’t been following these titles, Sony’s reissue label is releasing 11 budget-oriented live compilations (basically a live counterpart to their successful and sometimes collector-worthy Playlist series) on July 13. Happily, VVN’s post (the information of which comes from Legacy itself) shows the discs seem rather forthcoming about recording information – and a few of the discs boast some rare or unreleased content!

Hit the jump to check everything out.

Prince Week Day 6: Life in the Madhouse

In determining what was going to make up the contents of Prince Week, a great deal of agonizing was endured over where to place Prince’s many side projects. Prince, ever the purple brain trust, developed a lot of side projects over time, particularly during the beginning of his success as a pop artist. The Time, Sheila E. and Vanity 6 are still the best acts he ever squired in the early Paisley Park years, but there were plenty others that deserve a look back someday – and ultimately, the sheer volume of those acts meant that they’d have to wait for another time.

But one act remained worth discussing because it was a project Prince was more explicitly involved in than the others. This project was a different genre with a great group of musicians involved and a heap of Prince-worthy twists and turns throughout the better part of a decade. The band was Madhouse, and the story is after the jump.