This Texas singer-songwriter works in epic strokes. His 2001 album with the power trio Lift to Experience, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, was a sprawling two-CD forecast of Armageddon. This solo debut is as commanding: emotional trial ("Woman, When I've Raised Hell") and despair ("Country Dumb") stripped to Pearson's fraught vocals and hypnotic, irregular fingerpicking. He veers from hush to howl in torrents of confession like a prairie-minister cross of Bob Dylan's talking blues and Jeff Buckley's raptures. But when Pearson gets to the apology in "Sorry With a Song," his faith in love rings loud and pure through the hell.

Listen to "Woman, When I've Raised Hell":

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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."