All Music Guide's classical editors and writers have picked some of their favorite albums of the first half of 2009. It's a terrific selection -- enjoy!

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Sky Saxon, lead singer with 60s garage punk legends the Seeds, died on the morning of June 25, 2009 (or as his official web site put it, he “passed over to be with YaHoWha�); as it happened, he died the same day as both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, ensuring that the entertainment press, who might have been expected to treat his passing like a one-line filler item, didn’t even give it that much attention. But Saxon hadn’t been a celebrity in the traditional sense for a very long time. Sky may have been a rock star for about two years on the strength of the singles “Pushin’ Too Hard� and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,� but after those twenty-four months as a bargain-basement Mick Jagger, he evolved into Flower Power’s Last Man Standing, a guy who let his freak flag fly with a wild-eyed sincerity that made most of his peers from the Sunset Strip scene look like weekenders, and transformed his story into something far more interesting than the typical two-hit wonder and cult hero.

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The sunburns have begun to heal. The ears have stopped ringing. But the memories of Bonnaroo 2009 -- which saw nearly 80,000 people flocking to Tennessee for a weekend of live performances and varying weather patterns -- don’t fade so easily. This was Andrew's fourth time at the festival, and some things never change. There will always be mud. There will always be harsh, unrelenting heat. As the festival wraps up on Sunday evening, a combination of substance abuse and sleep deprivation will inevitably take their toll on Bonnaroo’s most adventurous attendees, resulting in a subdued atmosphere and a sea of passed-out bodies.

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