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.

Irma Thomas · 2004 Spin it Again - Randy Newman wrote one of the songs, a residential studio near a Louisiana river caught the rest, and somehow nobody made a bigger deal of this at the time.

Bettye LaVette · 2003 Spin it Again - She'd been making records since 1962 and this is the one that made people feel guilty for not knowing her name sooner.

Bettye LaVette · 2005 Spin it Again - Joe Henry recorded this in his house in South Pasadena and somehow made a sixty-year-old Detroit lifer sound like the only adult in the room.

Odyssey · 1978 Spin it Again - Phyllis Rhodes and her cousins figured out that disco and soul were the same conversation, and nobody at the party argued with them.

Shuggie Otis · 1974 Spin it Again - A kid alone in his home studio in 1974, playing every instrument, going nowhere commercially, getting everything right.

Sly and the Family Stone · 1971 Spin it Again - Sly Stone locked himself in a home studio, turned the funk to mud, and made something so exhausted and paranoid it still sounds like 3am on a bad year.

Anita Baker · 1986 Spin it Again - There is no album called "Mute" by Anita Baker from 1986 — her 1986 record was "Rapture," and getting that wrong would embarrass us both.

Sade · 1985 Spin it Again - Sade Adu singing like she has nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there, over jazz that never once tries to impress you.

Bill Withers · 1972 Spin it Again - Bill Withers recorded this at 34, after years of working a factory floor, and you can hear every single one of those years.

Aretha Franklin · 1967 Spin it Again - Aretha walked into Muscle Shoals in January, got into a fight with her husband on the second day, and still cut the title track before anyone could stop her.

Roberta Flack · 1969 Spin it Again - Roberta Flack walked into a studio in 1969 and played piano like she had thirty more years of heartbreak to account for, and it turns out she was right.

Leon Thomas · 1973 Spin it Again - Leon Thomas yodeling over spiritual jazz like he's trying to contact something the rest of us stopped believing in a long time ago.