Half Smiles of the Decomposed is reportedly the final Guided by Voices studio album, and like many of the band's best, it's packed to bursting with sometimes inscrutable pleasures: melodies with the whiff of half-remembered classics, misbegotten home-taping experiments, arrangements that appear to collapse before resolving in brave choruses and, in "Window of My World," the baroque folkie musings of a psychedelic jester. With lyrics that sometimes veer into gibberish ("Fit me into your thimble/I'll be your comeback trail") delivered in a fake English accent, GBV guiding light Robert Pollard sometimes sounds like a prog-rock throwback. But he's less of a word splicer than he is a general mischief-maker, a fabulist who sees songs as brightly painted reality-distortion knobs. So long, for now.

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.