Prince · 1981 Spin it Again - A twenty-two-year-old asking who he is over the only sound that matters: his own.

Prince · 1985 Spin it Again - He made Purple Rain a year earlier and could have done anything; instead he locked himself in the studio and made something genuinely strange.

Prince · 1982 Spin it Again - He recorded it alone in a basement in Minnesota and somehow made it sound like the future was starting right there.

João Gilberto · 1977 Spin it Again - After inventing bossa nova, Gilberto spent most of the seventies trying not to repeat himself; Amoroso is what happened when he stopped trying and just sang.

Van Morrison · 1974 Spin it Again - He stopped touring, stopped explaining, and made the most intimate album of his life with barely a session musician in sight.

The B-52'S · Spin it Again - A timeless record from The B-52'S that rewards close listening.

Mr. Bungle · 1991 Spin it Again - John Zorn produced a metal band that played lounge jazz, prog arrangements, and avant-garde deconstruction in the same breath, and somehow made it cohere.

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.

Prince & The Revolution · 1984 Spin it Again - He stripped the bass line out of 'When Doves Cry' at the last minute and it somehow has more bottom than anything on the radio that year.

Mark Knopfler · 1991 Spin it Again - He had the biggest-selling British rock album behind him and made this instead — a quiet, fingerpicked thing about faith healers and dead kings.

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.

Bonnie Raitt · 1977 Spin it Again - She learned slide guitar from Mississippi Fred McDowell in person, and by 1977 she was making records this quietly confident while Warner Bros. looked the other way.

Deep Purple · 1972 Spin it Again - The casino burned down the night before they were supposed to record, so they set up in a hotel corridor and made this instead.

Deep Purple · 1972 Spin it Again - You've owned this record for years and you still haven't actually listened to Jon Lord.

Blue Rodeo · 1991 Spin it Again - Toronto, 1991, while grunge was eating everything — Blue Rodeo made a pedal-steel record about memory and didn't apologize for a second of it.

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.

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.

Grateful Dead · 1970 Spin it Again - Six months after Workingman's Dead, they went back to the same room and got it even more right.

Laurie Anderson · 1993 Spin it Again - This proves that all albums in the 90's weren't bad