Click to listen to La Sera's "La Sera"

In Vivian Girls, Katy Goodman always delivers the emotional assist: As the Brooklyn garage rockers’ bassist and back-up vocalist, her tense walking lines and falsetto sighs bring sensitivity to the ladies’ lo-fi squall. Her newest solo project, La Sera, replaces distortion with light, beatific girl-group harmonies and clean, sweet production of jangling surf guitars and soft brushes of snare drum. Her featherlight vocals touch on romantic pitfalls — she vows confidently to bore her lover to pieces in "I Promise You" ("I won’t ever let you go/You’ll get sick of me soon" she coos) — but La Sera’s debut is about buoyancy, not drowning.

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“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."