The Cars · 1981 Spin it Again - The Cars at the exact moment when every night on the road had made them a machine without yet making them a tired one.

Stevie Nicks · 1981 Spin it Again - Jimmy Iovine knew what radio needed, Stevie Nicks knew what she'd been carrying for years, and somehow neither one had to compromise.

Pat Benatar · 1980 Spin it Again - She had been singing in Holiday Inns two years before this, and then she went quadruple platinum.

Marilyn Martin · 1982 Spin it Again - The session world produced a lot of voices in the early eighties — this is the one that should have gotten a second album.

Modern English · 1981 Spin it Again - Everything they did before the song that followed them everywhere — and it turns out it was the more interesting half.

Itzhak Perlman, London Philharmonic Orchestra · 1982 Spin it Again - Elgar dedicated this concerto to an unnamed soul and then put five dots where the name should go — Perlman is the only violinist who seems to actually live inside that silence.

Peter Gabriel · 1986 Spin it Again - Stewart Copeland played drums on one track, Kate Bush sang on another, and somehow the whole thing sounds like one continuous thought.

Talking Heads · 1986 Spin it Again - The one where Talking Heads stopped dissecting America and just let it be strange and enormous and okay.

Vicki Brown · 1982 Spin it Again - One of Britain's most in-demand session singers gets a Biddu production and forty minutes to herself — and sounds like she's been saving this up for years.

Culture Club · 1983 Spin it Again - Boy George was twenty-two and already knew that the quieter he sang, the harder it landed.

The Human League · 1982 Spin it Again - A remix album that has no right being this good — Rushent went back into the Dare tapes and found rooms no one knew were there.

Depeche Mode · 1981 Spin it Again - The principal songwriter left before the second album, and somehow that's when Depeche Mode actually started.

Eurogliders · 1984 Spin it Again - Grace Knight sang jazz standards later in life, and once you hear this record properly you understand exactly why that was always inevitable.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo · 1987 Spin it Again - Seventy years of Black South African choral tradition, recorded at the Hit Factory in New York, miscategorized as folk music, and still more patient than anything else in your library.

Johnny Clegg & Savuka · 1988 Spin it Again - A white Zulu street dancer and an eight-piece band made the most politically dangerous music in apartheid South Africa, and it grooves the whole time.

Paul Simon · 1986 Spin it Again - A middle-aged folk singer went to apartheid South Africa with a hunch and came home with the fretless bass line that has been stuck in your head since 1987.

Devo · 1981 Spin it Again - This is Devo before anyone had heard of Devo, playing to rooms full of people who had no idea what they were watching.

Iron Maiden · 1983 Spin it Again - The record where five guys who had never quite been the same band in the same room finally locked into one, and stayed there for a decade.

The Plasmatics · 1983 Spin it Again - The band that blew up cars on TV made a hushed, lonely EP in 1983, and nobody noticed.

Oingo Boingo · 1983 Spin it Again - Eleven musicians, one very anxious Danny Elfman, and a producer from the Canterbury scene walked into a Hollywood studio and made the Oingo Boingo album that still doesn't get its due.