With his now-defunct band Girls, Christopher Owens was a stylistic crate-digger, repurposing classic-rock gestures. On his solo debut, he nails a Seventies-singer-songwriter sound oozing treacle and sincerity, all folk guitar, flutes, supper-club saxes and vintage keyboards. It fits the concept: a loosely autobiographical musician-in-love song cycle that reprises the same pastoral melody, from the genteel psychedelia of "Here We Go" to the reggae lite of "Riviera Rock." But couplets like "I remember lookin' up the barrel of a loaded gun/Texas cops and cookin' drugs" show something thornier than just a warm-fuzzy irony-free zone. It's easy-listening music for deeply uneasy times.

Listen to Lysandre:

“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."