Fans of Belle and Sebastian's witty bookworm pop are an obsessive lot, and no doubt they'll snap up this cherry-picked collection of BBC recordings from 1996 to 2001. The draw for devotees is four rare songs from a 2001 session, including a hilarious fan letter to kindred indie-pop intellectuals the Go-Betweens ("Shoot the Sexual Athlete") and a kind of hushed farewell sung by Isobel Campbell, who left the group soon after ("Nothing in the Silence"). Otherwise, aside from a breezy glockenspiel revision of "Lazy Line Painter Jane," these versions are pretty close to the studio originals. But the selection is so good, the set doubles as a best-of — it's a fine intro to the group's tuneful world of lovelorn geekdom.

“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.