Search "milla thyme" 224 Items

Why you'll love it...
“In the first 75 years of Carnegie Hall being in operation, country music was an intermittent guest in the hallowed hall. In March 1966, however, a country band from Bakersfield, California, took to Carnegie Hall’s stages at the peak of their powers, as only the second country band to headline a show there, and ultimately released — outside of At Folsom Prison — the most important live country album ever. An album that proved many things between its two sides: that country music had an audience around the world already, and that the artist behind the album’s gamble on himself and his sound proved that you didn’t need to go to Nashville and sell out to sell big. With Carnegie Hall Concert, Buck Owens and His Buckaroos entered the pantheon of country music, becoming part of its very fiber, and altered the way it was considered in big cities and at record labels.”

Why you'll love it...
Townes Van Zandt’s work, as far-reaching and as universal as it has become, begs for possessorship. It’s a love language understood by all who find it, yet one that remains acutely difficult to translate to those who haven’t.



No one understood this better than his earliest fans. It’s perhaps why his first studio album, For the Sake of the Song, remains a point of controversy among anyone who discovered Townes Van Zandt outside of these LP’s grooves. Townes Van Zandt the songwriter was the antithesis of bells and whistles, and so an album with such accoutrements, as this album has in spades, rings false — however unfairly — among purists. Taken in context, though, For the Sake of the Song is a gorgeous study in polarity. Each anchor is an artist from wildly different backgrounds, united under the profound effect of songcraft.

Why you'll love it...
After recording demos with Sam Phillips that he considered "too jazzy" Charlie Rich was given a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis records to study and "come back when [he got] that bad". The single "Lonely Weekends" hit Top 30 and earned a gold record for selling one million copies. The album features classics such as "C.C. Rider," "You're Gonna Be Waiting" and "Apple Blossom Time."

Limited to 1000 copies, the VMP exclusive edition of Charlie Rich's Lonely Weekends is pressed on Sky Blue vinyl at Softwax Record Pressing. The AAA 1LP will arrive in a single, direct-to-board jacket.

Why you'll love it...
“Knowing Tammy Wynette’s troubled history, and with 50-plus years of social change since the recording and release of Stand By Your Man, it’s difficult to hear the album and not want to scream: Tammy, get out of there; you’re so much better than him! But that’s not to say that the album, which ascended to No. 2 on Billboard’s Country Albums chart and earned a Country Music Association Album of the Year nomination in 1969, isn’t worth listening to. Wynette’s mournful voice, described by her longtime producer Billy Sherrill as ‘husky and soulful and tearful and dynamic,’ was made for songs like these; frankly, so were her real-life experiences. ‘She lived it, you know. She lived every tear every-body ever heard her sing,’ Sherrill once said of Wynette, and he assembled talented musicians to match her delivery in lush, Nashville Sound-era style.”

Punch out hole. multi-colored "splatter" vinyl in a tri-fold die-cut jacket. Edge wear.

1976 reissue. Price tag.

180g vinyl.
Copy is close to NM.

taped spines

Vinyl close to VG+. Cover with shelf wear

Still sealed with OBI. tiny wear. 2022 reissue.

Why you'll love it...
If there is a single album nexus point between what Waylon’s early career was like, and what his Imperial King of Country era was like, it’s The Taker/Tulsa: The one album from his pre-outlaw period that stands above the rest, a record that would help break an outsider songwriter to the Nashville mainstream, prove Waylon had instincts that couldn’t be taught and was maybe onto something that would
flower into all his commercial success later on.

Why you'll love it...
What’s most apparent, though, across Coat of Many Colors — through the pain, the work, the heartbreak and even the cruelty — is Parton’s complete, undying adoration for life and the people in it. “Early Morning Breeze,” a track that subtly veers into psychedelic folk, is a spiritual meditation that observes and appreciates the simplicity of an early morning walk through a meadow and a moment of prayer. Album closer “A Better Place To Live” takes time to imagine what an actively kinder world would look like. Bold and brilliant “Here I Am,” in retrospect, serves as a much more definitive, and more fitting, introduction to her self-driven rise than a simple “Hello, I’m Dolly.” Sung almost exclusively in Dolly’s unhinged all-out belt, the song’s a pipe-showcasing testament to the simple power of showing up: lending a hand, offering an understanding ear, knowing how much love you’ve got to give and shelling it out indiscriminately.

Why you'll love it...
Kris Kristofferson was the true country outsider, a man who single-handedly pushed the genre leftward, changing forever the perception of its songwriters, its performers and its message. He was long-haired, anti-war and sang songs with drug use, sex and violence always lurking as dangers in the margins, at a time when Waylon and Willie were wearing sweaters and playing golf on their album covers. He was the outlaw, in a genre that would soon have people recording his songs, and co-opting his vision for a new version of country, to much greater financial success.

Vinyl is Close to VG+.

Why you'll love it...
“Dave Van Ronk was bemused by the title of this album. He didn’t think of himself as a folksinger and had mixed feelings about what he wryly called ‘the Great Folk Scare’ of the 1960s. And yet, he was a central figure on that scene and this album was instrumental in shaping a new sense of what it meant to be a folk musician. A generation of guitarists took him as a model and honed their skills on his arrangements of ‘Come Back Baby’ and ‘Cocaine Blues,’ and his masterful reimagining of older traditions made him a defining voice of the folk-blues revival, showing that a young, urban performer could reshape songs from rural sources into modern, personal statements that were as rough and honest as anything from the hills or prairies.”

Closing Time foreshadows the distinctly lyrical storytelling and original blending of jazz, blues, and folk styles that would come to be associated with Waits. It is on this debut album that Waits performs enduring classics of his career “Ol’ 55” (famously covered by the Eagles), the heartbreaking “Martha” and the gentle acoustic folk of “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You”. Reissued for the first time as a double LP to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landmark debut with newly half speed mastering at Abbey Road Studios.

Why you'll love it...
For all of its humor and goofiness, Sweet Revenge remains grounded in its observant reverence for humanity in all its contradictory and weird manifestations. The wild and wonderful products of Prine’s active imagination, after all, are just more ways to tell a story. Behind the self-assurance, the rock ’n’ roll attitude and the off-kilter punchlines, there’s still the same songwriter who captured the world with his debut: a poet who could build a world inside of a song, drop you inside of it, turn it upside down and, above all, make you feel like it belongs to you.

Why you'll love it...
“On Honky Tonk Heroes, Waylon Jennings had no one else to answer to, and the joyful mess of the album testifies to the kind of magic that can happen when you finally cut a lifelong misfit loose.
Honky Tonk Heroes isn’t Jennings’ first great album, but it was the first that captured his wild-hair energy instead of attempting to tame it. It belonged completely to him. It was so liberating that it would unleash a series of triumphs. This is the birthplace of the iconic 1970s Waylon, the one who would go on to slalom across the rest of the decade on a series of increasingly brilliant albums and mountains of cocaine. Waylon Jennings transformed himself into the Waylon, the leader of a movement forever altering the perception of country music in America.”

Released when Dolly Parton was 27 years old, the introductory track of My Tennessee Mountain Home finds her reading an old letter she wrote to her parents when she left home to chase a music career in Nashville at age 18. Her dispatch from Music City embodies a familiar feeling, no matter where you come from: going off on your own, only to find you miss all the trappings of home that you never noticed or appreciated.

‘Where I came from, people never dreamed of venturing out. They just lived and died there,’ she told Playboy in 1978. ‘To me, a little kid coming from where I did and having that ambition and sayin’ I wanted to be a star, people would say, “Well, it’s good to daydream, but don’t get carried away.”’

Originally released as a private cassette only release in 1974, this is the debut album of progressive folk-rock band Spriguns.

Homemade, charming folk-rock with the lovely voice of Mandy Morton, 12-string guitars, dulcimer, mandolin, fiddle… Fabulous covers of “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”, “Matty Groves” and more!

Formed in the early 70s, Spriguns of Tolgus evolved from the folk duo of Mandy & Mike Morton and the scene centered around their Anchor Folk Club in Cambridge. In 1974, the band (Mike and Mandy plus Rick Thomas and Chris Russon) decided to produce a recording to raise funds for new equipment. Using a small tape recorder and mixing desk, “Rowdy Dowdy Day” was recorded live in the dining room at the band’s rented house. A small number of cassettes were produced and subsequently sold at the Anchor Folk Club.

With the original cassette impossible to find now, we’re glad to present a new vinyl edition.

Vinyl close to VG+

A long-lost Japanese acid folk gem, Niningashi’s 1974 private press debut Heavy Way shimmers with originality, deft song writing and a dream-like groove.

Although he was training as a pharmacist, Kazuhisa Okubo was much more interested in prescribing musical medicine.

A coming-of-age album, Heavy Way captured a turning point in Okubo’s life, and Japanese society more widely as a nostalgia for the pastoral calm of the traditional life, met the cosmopolitan thrill of coffee, sex and cigarettes in the big city.

Intoxicated by Tokyo, driven by a passion for music and surrounded by a thriving acid folk scene, the young student filtered his experiences through a psychedelic cocktail of soulful influences from the US and Japan.

Niningashi was his first band, and Heavy Way was their only album. It was honest and raw, deep and strangely funky, in an off-beat kind of way. Across nine tracks, Okubo and the 6-piece band put their own spin on the new folk sound of Japan, combining witty lyrics with electric guitar-driven solos and crisp, understated grooves.

Melancholy and profound, opening track ‘Ameagari’ feels like a synthesis of Harvest-era Neil Young and Haruomi Hosono’s Happy End. Then there’s the whimsical washboard country sound of ‘Semai Boku No Heyade’; the moody, low-lit charm of ‘Restaurant’; and ‘Hitoribotchi’, a sensitive portrayal of childhood, steeped in memories of rainfall that will resonate with fans of Woo and Mac Demarco.

While Okubo would go on to taste success with psychedelic folk bands Neko and Kaze, the latter of which scored three #1 albums, little is known about his mysterious debut with Niningashi.

Self-released by Okubo in 1974, and featuring album artwork by his brother, it has slowly generated a cult following online, intrigued by its soft and enchanting sound. So few records were ultimately pressed that those remaining have fetched up to £1,500 online.

Featured on Time Capsule’s era-spanning collection Nippon Acid Folk, Niningashi’s Heavy Way is a deep-cut grail of a vibrant time in Japan’s musical history, where even the pharmacists were making jams.

Why you'll love it...
'Groover's Paradise' is the third studio album from Doug Sahm, and the VMP Country Record of the Month for April 2022. It's here on AAA 180g "Texas Sunshine" colored vinyl, with lacquers cut from the original master tapes by Ryan Smith of Sterling Sound.

Why you'll love it...
Willie Nelson wants it known, despite being divorced twice and married thrice before writing the album — including one that was spurred by his second wife finding a maternity ward bill from his eventual third — that Phases and Stages is and was not autobiographical. “The overall theme was not a reflection of my own life,” he said in his 2015 biography It’s A Long Story: My Life. “I was simply making up a story. Sure, I’d gone through breakups and heartaches of my own. What human soul hasn’t?” But when you make an album like Phases and Stages, the most devastating, humanistic divorce record of all time — and be beaten by an ex-wife after she sews you into your sheets — people begin to believe the album is about you and your ex-wives.

Small sticker on front.

Why you'll love it...
‘’Loretta Lynn had started working on her 25th studio LP, Back to the Country, in 1972. Its eventual opening track, ‘’The Pill,'' was a song about the birth control pill and the freedoms it could give a woman from — but not limited to — a philandering husband. At first, it was put in Lynn’s back pocket after a recording session when the label deemed it too controversial to release. The label was right, of course. It was controversial. But they were wrong about the consequences of releasing a song so polarizing. Though radio stations across the country banned ‘’The Pill,'' that only made it more alluring to fans who helped boost its sales, making it one of her biggest sellers of all time. Lynn may not have been close to being one of the “outlaw” musicians of the late ’60s — not decked in leather nor caught smoking weed with Willie Nelson — but you could easily argue she was among the most outlaw of them all.''

Why you'll love it...
Live at The Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, the 1977 record from troubadour Townes Van Zandt, is the VMP Country Record of the Month for November 2022. It's here on exclusive 2LP Black & White Galaxy vinyl with lacquers cut by...

Insert included.

Vinyl is close to NM. Japanese pressing. OBI is missing. With insert. Tear in top spine.

Japanese pressing without OBI, but with insert. Vinyl close to VG+

Original japanese pressing with obi.

No Obi, no insert.

Original japanese pressing without OBI!