Mirror Blue by Richard Thompson

Mirror Blue, Richard Thompson's eighth studio album, came out on Capitol in 1994, though he had cut it in January 1993 with Mitchell Froom producing again. It followed 1991's Rumor and Sigh and sat on the shelf partly because of a shake-up at the top of Capitol, where his champion Hale Milgrim gave way to Gary Gersh, and the label never pushed it the way it had pushed the last ones.

The former Fairport Convention guitarist and Froom set out to take the rock rhythm section apart, in the spirit of Froom's records with Suzanne Vega and Los Lobos and engineer Tchad Blake's work with Tom Waits, and the drums come out clanking, boxy and strange. Critics fixated on that sound and sales were poor, but the songs outlasted the fuss. "Beeswing", a tender tale of a wandering young woman and the price she and the man who loves her pay for their choices, grew into one of his most admired songs; Thompson later revealed she was modeled on folksinger Anne Briggs, whom he knew only through Sandy Denny's stories.

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