Mike Oldfield · 1973 · A nineteen-year-old in a converted barn made one of the strangest best-sellers of the 1970s, and nobody — least of all him — has quite explained how.

Boards of Canada · 1998 · This is what happens when two Scottish brothers spend years building a time machine out of analog synths and old VHS tapes, and the only place they can go is the ghost of your own childhood.

Yo La Tengo · 2000 · They made an album that sounds like the moment after you've finally stopped talking.

Angelo Badalamenti · 1990 · Badalamenti's score is the third character in Twin Peaks, breathing humidity and dread.

Tim Buckley · 1967 · Tim Buckley's second album found him turning his back on pure folk and into a darker, orchestral world that his voice could barely contain.

Judy Collins · 1961 · Judy Collins before she was anybody. Just a voice, a guitar, and songs that had been around for centuries.

Joan Baez · 1960 · She walked into a hotel room and changed folk music forever.

The Millennium · 1968 · Curt Boettcher assembled a dream studio team and this is the only record they left behind.

Sandy Denny · 1971 · She had already written 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes' and was the only guest vocalist on Led Zeppelin's 'The Battle of Evermore'. This album is quieter and stranger than all of that.

Dido · 1999 · She wrote dozens of versions of 'Thank You' before settling on the one that ended up on a record so quiet it made $20 million.

Van Morrison · 1968 · Van Morrison walked into Century Sound Studios with a guitar and a notebook and walked out with something nobody had ever heard before.

Laura Nyro · 1969 · She married the grit of New York to the ache of gospel and called it a tendaberry.

Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Sarah Kirkland Snider · 2019 · Carolyn Forché's poetry gets the chamber treatment it always deserved—no filler, no nostalgia, just twilight in stereo.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen · 2019 · Two men who make music so slow and huge it feels like a landscape — recorded with forty-eight strings in Budapest and mixed for the hours after midnight.

Caroline Shaw · 2017 · The string quartet as architecture, built by a composer who knows pop, folk, and the baroque as well as any living writer.

Caroline Shaw · 2019 · She treats her own voice like a violin, and the string quartet like a choir — then dissolves into something that sounds like light through stained glass.

Antonio Carlos Jobim · 1970 · Creed Taylor took Jobim to New York and got a stoned masterpiece out of him.

Antonio Carlos Jobim · 1967 · Claus Ogerman’s strings don’t just accompany Jobim’s piano — they complete thoughts he could only hint at.

Ann Peebles · 1969 · Ann Peebles didn’t need to scream – she just opened her mouth and the Memphis Horns did the rest.

Townes Van Zandt · 1968 · A drunk poet walks into a Nashville barn and records the saddest songs you'll ever hear.