Nick Drake · 1972 Spin it Again - Twenty-two minutes, one guitar, one voice, and Drake was dead two years later — some nights that's all the context you need.

Patti Smith · 1978 Spin it Again - Patti Smith screaming her way through Because the Night, a song Tom Petty passed on and Springsteen half-wrote, and somehow she ended up owning all of it.

Joni Mitchell · 1972 Spin it Again - She sat down at a piano in Christmas-time Los Angeles and made loneliness sound like the most precise thing in the room.

Rickie Lee Jones · 1979 Spin it Again - She showed up in 1979 with a beat-up beret and a voice that sounded like it had already been through something, and nobody from that year sounds quite like her.

Nick Drake · 1970 Spin it Again - Nick Drake in 1970, strings arranged by Robert Kirby, jazz musicians who barely knew him, and somehow that distance is exactly what makes it hurt.

Carole King · 1971 Spin it Again - Carole King sat down at a piano in 1971 and quietly made every other singer-songwriter that decade feel like they were still figuring it out.

Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions · 2003 Spin it Again - Sandoval sounds like she's singing from the bottom of a well and somehow that's the only place you want to be at 2am.

Joni Mitchell · 1972 Spin it Again - She wrote these songs alone in the Canadian wilderness and it shows in the best possible way.

Joni Mitchell · 1971 Spin it Again - She sat down at a piano in 1971 and decided to just say the whole thing, and nobody's really recovered from it since.

Joni Mitchell · 1974 Spin it Again - Joni Mitchell figured out that jazz musicians could make pop songs feel like they were falling apart in exactly the right places, and then she proved it.

Feist · 2007 Spin it Again - Leslie Feist made a record about wanting things you can't quite name, and she did it without once raising her voice.

Kasey Chambers · 1999 Spin it Again - Kasey Chambers was nineteen years old, raised on the Nullarbor Plain hunting foxes, and that's exactly what this sounds like.

Gillian Welch · 2001 Spin it Again - Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in a room with two guitars, taking their time, and somehow that's enough.

Beck · 2002 Spin it Again - Beck made an entire album about heartbreak and somehow the pedal steel guitar did more talking than he did.

Prefab Sprout · 1985 Spin it Again - Paddy McAloon sat down in 1985 and wrote melodies so precisely sad they made Thomas Dolby's production feel like the only logical place to put them.

Judee Sill · 1973 Spin it Again - She wrote the orchestral arrangements herself while on parole, and you can hear every bit of that in the strings.

Lucinda Williams · 2008 Spin it Again - She sounds like she's been driving all night and just remembered why she left in the first place.

Shelby Lynne · 2000 Spin it Again - Shelby Lynne covering the soundtrack to a John Cusack movie nobody asked for and somehow making it sound like 2 AM in a bar where everyone's pretending they're fine.