Neko Case turned up forty years or so too late to be one of the great country voices of the Fifties — hearts break whenever she hits one of those seraphic high notes. The songs on her fourth studio album, though, are vastly weirder than her precursors': You'll find evocative story fragments about profound alienation written in the dense language of contemporary poetry ("the sledge of tectonic fever"); chorusless rambles with one long free-form verse; oblique songs about songs that suggest she's been studying her New Pornographers bandmate Dan Bejar's stuff; and folk-song lines about John the Baptist. But from her luscious, aching croon, and her ensemble's solemn high-mesa twang and groove (the crew includes members of Calexico and the Band's Garth Hudson), you'd never guess she wasn't covering Patsy Cline standards.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.