Happy 15th Anniversary to Common’s fifth studio album Electric Circus, originally released December 10, 2002.

Common’s fifth album Electric Circus is a daringly ambitious endeavor that wears its heart on its record sleeve. A glance at the album cover reveals a collage of faces (some famous, some not) staring out with Common himself front and center. The parallels with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are immediate and obvious. It’s not only the collage of figures that hints at this scale of ambition, but also the typeface used to emblazon the album title across the top of the cover, which bears a striking resemblance to that used on the Beatles’ idiosyncratic work of genius.

The faces here though are the great and the good of Common’s sphere. Musicians who contribute to the album, those who are long departed, and family members jostle for position in Common’s world—‘Common Sense’s Soulful Hip Hop Land’ if you will. And boy those contributors are something else. Some contributors (Questlove, James Poyser, J Dilla) are wholeheartedly in keeping with the Soulquarian stylings that dominated Electric Circus’ precursor Like Water for Chocolate (2000). Others though are less expected like Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab lending her dreamy Gallic charms to “New Wave.”