KT Tunstall turned heads in 2004 with just the power of her voice and her guitar, but the intervening years have found her showing little interest in being just another worked-up folkie. On her third album, Tiger Suit, she leavens sleek pop songs with her warm-whiskey rasp, clawing against the digitized guitar in "Difficulty" and rocketing up the center of the galloping, tribal "Uummannaq Song." Though the album was recorded in the same Berlin studio where U2 created Achtung Baby, Suit's chief aim isn't experimentalism so much as empathy. "Push That Knot Away" may pivot on a pulsing dance beat and a tense, minor-key strum, but its lyrics are hellbent on encouragement: "May you always live in hope," Tunstall coos, as the storm builds behind her. That it can so nimbly navigate such contradictions is one of Tiger Suit's cleverest tricks.

“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."