Nonesuch Records Vinyl, CDs & Cassettes

Nonesuch has never cared much about genre, and that's exactly the point. Founded in 1964 as a budget classical imprint, the label spent the next six decades becoming something harder to categorize and far more interesting: a home for artists who didn't fit cleanly anywhere else and were better for it.

The catalog is genuinely staggering in its range. Steve Reich and Philip Glass found a serious home here at a time when minimalism was still fighting for legitimacy in concert halls. Emmylou Harris made some of her most enduring records under this roof. Brad Mehldau, Kronos Quartet, Bill Frisell, Rhiannon Giddens, Fleet Foxes, Punch Brothers, Ry Cooder, the Magnetic Fields. Artists from West Africa, Cuba, Eastern Europe, and beyond found American audiences through Nonesuch's Explorer Series before "world music" was even a category anybody used.

What ties all of it together isn't a sound; it's a standard. Every record in this collection was made by someone who had something real to say, and a label behind them that knew it. These are the kind of records people hold onto, the ones that show up in collections passed down from parents, dog-eared in old issues of this very magazine.

If you're building a shelf worth being proud of, you're in the right place.