At one time, I thought I owned every album Andrew Gold played on between 1974 and 1980, nearly all of them recorded and produced in southern California. I was wrong. I never owned the albums he recorded with Barbi Benton, Hugh Hefner's girlfriend in the early 1970s, even though she went to high school with me. I wasn't intentionally collecting...

EVEN now, lounging around her apartment at the age of 62, wearing Mephisto slippers and a far-from-revealing hoodie, Linda Ronstadt is thinking back to a summer in Guadalajara when she was 12, and a light-haired Mexican boy named Mario. ''I would flirt with him,'' she recalls wryly, her come-hither eyes and heart-shaped lips still echoing the days...

Lenine More than 20 years into a career as one of Brazil's most celebrated songwriters, Lenine has his first release in the United States. ''Lenine'' (Six Degrees) culls 15 songs from the past decade, discovering one supple hybrid after another. The pulse often comes from his syncopated guitar picking, and occasionally from the maracatú drumming...