Kevin Salem

Rolling Stone magazine once singled out Kevin Salem among the year's strongest songwriters, and the singer-songwriter has also produced recordings for other performers such as Giant Sand and Chocolate Genius while maintaining his own output. In the mid-1990s he issued two albums on Roadrunner Records, an imprint more commonly tied to heavy metal: Soma City in 1994 and Glimmer in 1996. Salem repeatedly deferred his planned third album, explaining that he had finished and then archived a new version each year after Glimmer appeared, always finding the results inadequate. The extended wait ended in 2001 with the arrival of Ecstatic, his debut release on the Future Farmer label. That album included contributions from the Bangles' Vicki Peterson, Donovan Leitch, Alice Temple, Barry Reynolds, Lydia Kavanaugh, and jazz keyboardist Rob Arthur.