The Blue Nile · 1989 Spin it Again - Nigel Godrich and the band spent months removing notes instead of adding them—and somehow made the most patient pop album of the 80s.

Vicky Brown · 1982 Spin it Again - Vicky Brown made this in 1982 with Quincy Jones and vanished; Doug Sax engineered it like it mattered; almost nobody heard it.

Marvin Gaye · 1971

Cymande · 1974 Spin it Again - Ten Caribbean-British musicians made one of the loosest records of the seventies and then quietly disappeared, leaving the crates to do the talking.

Cymande · 1973 Spin it Again - Eleven Caribbean musicians in a London studio made something so self-contained it took twenty years and a thousand sample clearances for the rest of the world to catch up.

Otis Redding · 1967 Spin it Again - He died twelve weeks after this came out, which means every track on it was recorded by a man who had no idea he was making a legacy.

Arthur Conley · 1967 Spin it Again - Otis Redding produced this record, co-wrote the hit, and was dead before the year was out — and somehow none of that is the most interesting thing about it.

Lorraine Ellison · 1966 Spin it Again - Stay With Me charted in 1967 and still nobody quite knew what to do with her — which tells you everything about 1967.

Vicki Brown · 2019 Spin it Again - Decades of session work, and this is the record where she finally gets the room to herself.

Wham! · 1984 Spin it Again - Every song on here was built by a twenty-one-year-old who understood the architecture of longing better than almost anyone working at the time.

Anita Baker · 1986 Spin it Again - Anita Baker made this after escaping a bad label deal, and you can hear the relief in every unhurried note.

Corinne Bailey Rae · 2006 Spin it Again - Four million people bought this record, and it never once raised its voice to earn any of them.

Amy Winehouse · 2003 Spin it Again - Before the tabloids, before the beehive became a costume, there was this — a teenager from Southgate cutting a hip-hop jazz record that most forty-year-olds couldn't have pulled off.

Lianne La Havas · 2012 Spin it Again - She plays her own guitar, sings behind the beat, and leaves more air in the room than anyone asked for — and somehow that's the whole trick.

Diana Ross · 1977 Spin it Again - Gil Askey built the room around her voice and then had the sense to leave it alone.

Anita Baker · 1986 Spin it Again - Nathan East on bass, Ricky Lawson on drums, and a singer who never once oversells it — this is what sophisticated looked like before that word got ruined.

Vicki Brown · 1979 Spin it Again - One of the best voices in British pop spent twenty years making everyone else sound good, then made this, and the world looked the other way.

Matthew Tavares · 2006 Spin it Again - Solo piano, 2006, Toronto, made before BADBADNOTGOOD existed — this is what it sounds like when someone plays like nobody's watching because nobody was.

Vulfpeck · 2020 Spin it Again - Joe Dart's bass and forty-one minutes of people who know exactly when not to play.

Scritti Politti · 1985 Spin it Again - Green Gartside spent years in a Welsh breakdown, then came back and made the most philosophically loaded pop record of 1985 — with Marcus Miller on bass.