Scottish singer-songwriting Lloyd Cole is on my mind this morning. Over the weekend, Apple Music started streaming Lloyd Cole In New York, the six-disc box set that gathers up his first four solo albums, a fifth unreleased collection recorded as the followup to Love Story, and a disc of demos made during the period covered by the retrospective: 1988 – 1996. As the title of the box underscores, this was Cole’s New York City period. The physical set is available for purchase on March 24th.

I’ve been a real-time Lloyd Cole fan: I loved him with The Commotions, loved him with half of Lou Reed’s band, loved him with The Negatives, loved him solo, and loved him as a duo with his son Will. This ongoing fandom implies something important about about Cole—at least for me: He doesn’t have a proper Imperial Period in the manner of The Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney or Elton John. An Imperial Period is that moment of never-putting-a-foot-wrong, usually accompanied by commercial success, inevitably followed by a leveling-off of pop ascent and, with luck, respectable cruising speed instead of a crash landing.

Lloyd Cole, along with Miles Davis, Pet Shop Boys, Peter Hammill or Robyn Hitchcock are among a handful of artists I listen to who have managed to evolve as opposed to leveling off or declining. I have no Unified Theory Imperial Period Survival. Peter Hammill was never a commercial powerhouse; Pet Shop Boys were bonafide pop stars at one time; Miles Davis, like David Bowie, kept shedding his skins and thus specific followings.

Thinking about this, it seems that Lloyd Cole aligns most closely with Robyn Hitchcock: Early modest success with a specific band, a solo career that exhibited early commercial potential and attendant Big Label support, and then an accomplished life post-air-play and post-big-labels as a constantly questing cult artist. Cole and Hitchcock had Compact Imperial Periods most accurately described as the zeitgeist briefly (perhaps even accidentally) intersecting their respective idiosyncratic artistic visions. Neither of them were mirrors of specific times—rather, the eras of their youth simply glinted off them as they made their artistic ways elsewhere.

This is a very lengthy way of saying that Lloyd Cole In New York is an important box set for fans because Cole has done so much excellent work in the years after his Compact Imperial Period that it’s nice to be reminded of the times when he was regularly played on the radio and his music had wide distribution.

Cole’s work in the 21st century is so good that I can (and have) happily listened to The Negatives, Music In A Foreign Language, Antidepressant, Broken Record and Standards almost at the expense of his earlier Big Label releases.

Lloyd Cole In New York is evidence of just how good he’s always been. The material in the set isn’t less mature, it’s simply earlier in what in retrospect has been a single, clear-cut evolutionary arc. It’s younger installments of a larger musical journey. It makes me recall how much I loved his first four solo albums when they were released. Which is a good thing because when Smile, If You Want To, the fifth “lost” album wasn’t released in its time, the astonishing pop perfection of The Negatives was—a recording whose brilliance, for me, nearly subsumed the first four solo releases.

Which brings us back around to Miles Davis: This box set does pretty much what the Sony Legacy boxes of Miles Davis periods did for his Columbia catalogue—it reminds the listener just how much excellent work was done in at a single point of the artist’s career.

If you have Lloyd Cole’s early solo work, you need this box. And if you don’t buy it and be astonished.