With her bright watercolor cover art and song titles like "Female Guitar Players Are the New Black" and "Her Confidence," indie-rock guitar virtuoso Marnie Stern is pretty upfront about making her own rules. Rather than deploy her blazing chops to ape manly guitar-god pyrotechnics, she shreds impressionistically, splaying fractals of noise and melody over drummer Zach Hill's jazz-spaz clatter. More impressively, she hones it all into emotionally powerful songs, somewhere between the maiden-metal of Heart and the contorted speed-blurt of Lightning Bolt, with her sweet, proud trill of a voice exploring doubt and desire, magic and beauty, "angels, diamonds and colors," the stuff of everyday life and the residue of dreams.

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“He Will Break Your Heart”

A lightly swinging Latin-influenced, almost cha-cha groove and close harmonies decorated Jerry Butler's early soul hit "He Will Break Your Heart," delivering a stately warning that his rival would never love his girl like he did. The melody came to Butler as he was driving on the highway from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Philadelphia with Curtis Mayfield, and as Butler told Rolling Stone, "I just sang the melody and Curtis put the chords to it." The song's premise, Butler added, "was something that I'd lived ...The lyric was an experience rather than a revelation. Whereas music is usually a revelation."