Pleasure describes the broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. It includes more specific mental states such as happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria. In psychology, the pleasure principle describes pleasure as a positive feedback mechanism, motivating the organism to recreate in the future the situation which it has just found pleasurable. According to this theory, organisms are similarly motivated to avoid situations that have caused pain in the past.

The experience of pleasure is subjective and different individuals will experience different kinds and amounts of pleasure in the same situation. Many pleasurable experiences are associated with satisfying basic biological drives, such as eating, exercise or sex. Other pleasurable experiences are associated with social experiences and social drives, such as the experiences of accomplishment, recognition, and service. The appreciation of cultural artifacts and activities such as art, music, and literature is often pleasurable.

Timothy Charles Buckley III (February 14, 1947 – June 29, 1975) was an American vocalist, and musician. His music and style changed considerably through the years; his first album (1966) was mostly folk oriented, but over time his music incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul, avant-garde and an evolving "voice as instrument," sound. He died aged 28, leaving his son Jeff Buckley from his marriage to Mary Guibert.

Tim Buckley was born in Washington DC on St. Valentine's Day, to Elaine Buckley (née Scalia), an Italian American, and Tim Charles Buckley Jr, who was the son of Irish immigrants from Cork. He spent his early childhood in Amsterdam, New York, an industrial city approximately 40 miles northwest of Albany; here at five years old he made his first acquaintance with music, his mother's progressive jazz recordings (she was a fan of Miles Davis).

Tim's musical life began in earnest after his family moved to Bell Gardens in southern California in 1956. His grandmother had introduced him to Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, his mother to Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and Judy Garland and his father to the country music of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. When he attended Bell Gardens' public schools he was ready to catch the folk bug going around. At the age of 13 he taught himself the banjo, and with his new friend, Dan Gordon, and several others formed a folk group inspired by the Kingston Trio that played local high school events.

Mary Ellen Pleasant (born 19 August ?1814-1817 - died 4 January 1904) was a 19th Century female entrepreneur of partial African descent widely known as Mammy Pleasant, who used her fortune to further the abolitionist movement. She worked on the Underground Railroad across many states and then helped bring it to California during the Gold Rush Era. She was a friend and financial supporter of John Brown and well known in abolitionist circles. After the Civil War she took her battles to the courts in the 1860s, and won several civil rights victories, one of which was cited and upheld in the 1980s and resulted in her being called “The Mother of Human Rights in California”.

Mary Ellen made contradictory claims about her earliest years. Her birthday is known to be August 19; the year has been listed as unknown, probably between 1814–1817, however, her gravestone at Tulocay Cemetery in Napa, California, states 1812. In one version of her memoirs dictated to her god-daughter, Charlotte Downs, she claimed she was born a slave to a Voodoo priestess and the youngest son of a Governor of Virginia, James Pleasants. In any case, she showed up in Nantucket, Massachusetts circa 1827 as a 10-13 year old bonded servant to store keeper, "Grandma" Hussey and worked out her bondage, then became a family member and lifelong friend to Grandma's granddaughter Phoebe Hussey Gardner. The Husseys were deeply involved in the abolitionist movement, and Mary Ellen met many of the famous luminaries of the movement during her youth on Nantucket.

Woods of Ypres were a blackened doom metal band from Ontario, Canada.

Woods of Ypres was formed in Windsor, Ontario in 2002 by David Gold, Aaron Palmer, and Brian McManus. The trio released the first Woods Of Ypres demo, Against the Seasons: Cold Winter Songs from the Dead Summer Heat, the same year. In 2003, David Gold moved to Toronto to begin working on a full-length album. In 2004, the band's first full-length album, Pursuit of the Sun & Allure of the Earth, was released on David Gold's record label, Krankenhaus Records. The third Woods of Ypres album, Woods III: Deepest Roots & Darkest Blues, was released at the end of 2007. Contrasting the two albums, critic Laura Taylor wrote, "While Pursuit of the Sun verged on metalized Pink Floyd, Woods’ latest unearths more of the band’s black and dark metal inspirations". In 2008, the band was featured on the cover of Unrestrained! Magazine.

After a work stint in South Korea, David Gold moved the band to his hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in 2008, where they recorded their fourth album Woods IV: The Green Album the following year. Released in November 2009, Exclaim! called it "the band's most amorphous and powerful creature so far." Earlier in 2009, Woods of Ypres also put out a compilation of 12 of the songs from their three main Krankenhaus-released albums entitled Independent Nature 2002-2007 and a vinyl-only single release of their 2004 song "Allure of the Earth", which also featured a cover of that song by Australian cellists Sebastian Simpson and Chris Doig.

Carole King (born February 9, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists during the 1960s, many of which have become standards. As a singer, her Tapestry album topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971, and remained on the charts for more than six years.

She was most successful as a performer in the first half of the 1970s, although she was a successful songwriter long before and long after. She had her first number 1 hit as a songwriter in 1961 at age 18, with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", which she wrote with Goffin. In 1997, she co-wrote "The Reason" for Aerosmith, but instead it was sung by Celine Dion.

In 2000, Joel Whitburn, a Billboard Magazine pop music researcher, named her the most successful female songwriter of 1955–99, because she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100.

King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry. Her most recent non-compilation album is Live at the Troubadour, a collaboration with James Taylor, which reached number 4 on the charts in its first week, and has sold over 600,000 copies.