The troubled life of French songbird Edith Piaf, who died in 1963 at forty-eight, had enough drama to fill a dozen movies. Her upbringing in a brothel, followed by bruising encounters with sex, booze and drugs, created a voice that touched the world with hits such as "La Vie en Rose," "Milord" and "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien." Somehow Olivier Dahan's impressionistic heartbreaker of a movie gets it all in. And Marion Cotillard, lip-syncing Piaf's songs and digging into her soul with gale-force urgency, gives a performance for the ages.

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."