Deer Tick's John McCauley has a wobbly voice and a wobblier sense of self. "Raindrops like bullets on my fragile skin/Insecurities I've had are creeping within," he croaks on "Twenty Miles" over chiming guitar and swelling backing vocals. Like all the songs on The Black Dirt Sessions, "Twenty Miles" is pretty, atmospheric — and too self-serious. Dirt has more mood pieces than songs, and the lyrics get just plain goofy. "Like a heart that's hung in the sky," he sings in "Christ Jesus," "The hard-on when I die."

“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.