Click to listen to Jessica Lea Mayfield's Tell Me

"There's not much I wouldn't let you whisper in my ear," coos Jessica Lea Mayfield on her second album. At 21, Mayfield looks like an ingénue but sings like a worldly-wise veteran, picking apart relationships with the sly eroticism of someone who's lived a little. Producer Dan Auerbach (of the Black Keys) gives Mayfield's confessions a darker hue, laying on tremolo guitar while nudging the noirish country songs toward British Invasion pop ("Nervous Lonely Night"), among other genres. But the most compelling sound on Tell Me is Mayfield's languid drawl. "My brain is speeding faster than my mouth can move," she sings. It's true — but with songs this seductive, that's no problem.

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“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."