In 1985, Sting gave up the role everyone loved him in — leader of the Police — and got on many sets of nerves, royally. But after fifteen years of skilled music, the notion of Sting as pompous pop serioso is dated. Brand New Day is Sting's most stylistically integrated album since 1987's Nothing Like the Sun. There's groovy Rai music, witty bossa novas, warm-hearted Bach revisions and independent country, plus a smashing finale, "End of the Game," that comfortably finishes the century with a fox-hunting metaphor. Sting hasn't changed his stripes: There's still expert musicianship, from Dominic Miller's guitar stylings to Sting's own terra-cotta vocal shadings and outbursts, and there's still superprecise song construction. But he sounds like what you have to sound like to keep doing fresh work when you're no longer a pup: unbored.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."