Once you've labored in cult obscurity, fielded rumors that John Tesh wanted to cover one of your songs, appeared on Beverly Hills 90210, composed an orchestra for forty automobile tape decks and enjoyed a minuscule Top Forty blip, what do you do for a follow-up? The eccentric Oklahoma outfit Flaming Lips serenely release another baffling, winning, neopsychedelic recording. Densely textured, awkward but somehow melodic, The Soft Bulletin finds these pop oddballs with their poker-faced humor firmly intact — "When you got that spider bite on your hand/I thought we would have to break up the band," sings Wayne Coyne in his strained Neil Young-style voice, referring to an accident that could only have happened to the Lips, and did. Their music isn't, how you say, universally accessible, and the weirdness gets same-y, but no one else has posited a parallel universe in which the Sixties and the Nineties exist simultaneously, allowing for a peculiarly convincing brand of monolithic robotic swirl.

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."