There's another connection between two secret sharers: Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson both convince you they just did whatever they did off the top of their heads. That's why Nelson's two big statements of the Nineties — 1993's Don Was-produced Across the Borderline and 1998's Daniel Lanois-produced Teatro — lack the magic of the austere Spirit, the instrumental Night and Day or even the casual remakes on last year's unnoticed Me and the Drummer. And it's why this half-assed half-kiddie album hits harder than last year's concept-controlled Milk Cow Blues. Named after and leading with a Kermit the Frog favorite, it tosses off many other gems this great lover of American song never got around to telling us about before, as it works its way to Mickey Newbury's funereal "The Thirty-third of August." But for all the charms of "I'm My Own Grandpa" and "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)," each delivered with a canny guilelessness that cuts through the silly and the pretentious with equal ease, the summation is one Willie wrote himself last year: "If we're backin' up, it's just to get a runnin' start/'Cause everything we do we do with all our hearts/And it don't really matter what they say/We wouldn't have it any other way."

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.