Reprise Records Vinyl, CDs & Cassettes

Frank Sinatra started Reprise in 1960 because he was tired of Capitol Records telling him what to do. The founding principle was simple and, for the era, genuinely radical: artists would have full creative control over their recordings, and eventually ownership of their own work. Sinatra built the label around himself and his Rat Pack circle, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and then sold it to Warner Bros. in 1963 when the finances got complicated.

What Warner did with it under President Mo Ostin turned out to be one of the better decisions in the history of the music business. Ostin moved the label away from the swing era roster and toward a generation of artists who had real things to say. Neil Young has recorded for Reprise for virtually his entire career, one of the longest and most productive relationships between a single artist and a single label in rock history. Jimi Hendrix came here. Joni Mitchell. Fleetwood Mac built the catalog that made them one of the best-selling acts of all time on this label. Frank Zappa used Reprise's Bizarre Records imprint to put out some of the most genuinely strange music of the era.

Randy Newman. Gordon Lightfoot. The Beach Boys through their more experimental period. Captain Beefheart. The Deftones. Green Day maintained their relationship with Reprise through some of the most commercially successful records of the Nineties and beyond.

The thread running through all of it goes back to Sinatra's founding idea: give the artists room and see what they make. The records in this collection are what happened when that philosophy was actually honored.