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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“The A Team”

This debut track from the then-20-year-old British singer-songwriter has a dark story behind it. Sheeran says he culls songwriting inspiration from "viewing other people's situations," which, for the heroine in "The A Team," involves drug addiction and prostitution that began as a teen. Sheeran paints the woman's trials with haunting imagery such as "But lately her face seems/Slowly sinking, wasting/Crumbling like pastries." "I did a gig at a homeless shelter, [and the song] is about one of the women there. It's her story," he said.