"Black hole," sings Josh Ritter, "are your eyes as empty as they look?" Not the best come-on, perhaps. But roughly a decade after topping a new school of singer-songwriters, Ritter hit a creative wall, and his latest is the sound of him kicking through it. The above is from "Rattling Locks," maybe his gnarliest song ever, with feedback guitar stalking a morose bass-clarinet line. "Folk Bloodbath" conflates Mississippi John Hurt's "Louis Collins," Johnny Cash's "Delia's Gone" and the legend of Stackalee, ending up – naturally – in a graveyard. Ritter's verse is myth-filled, by turns trippy and goofy: See "The Curse," a parlor-room piano ballad about a mummy and a hot anthropologist. Even at his darkest, love knows no boundaries.

“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.