Kacey Musgraves looks like a perfect country music ingenue – until you notice her nose-ring and the punky peroxide streak in her chestnut hair. The 24-year-old Texan's debut single is similar. It comes on gently – a banjo and a fingerpicked acoustic nudging a lovely singsong tune – but the story it tells is fierce and unblinking: a tale  of small town America, where bleak prospects, bad marriages, and boredom are a young woman's birthright. "Mary, Mary, quite contrary/We're so bored until we're buried," Musgrave sings. It's as poetic and potent as any song released in 2012 – an instant classic, a "My Hometown" for millennials.

Listen to "Merry Go Round":

“I Can See for Miles”

A foreboding accusation of lies and deception, "I Can See for Miles" was given a psychedelic hard-rock veneer by Pete Townshend's whiplash guitar riffs and Keith Moon's thundering drums. The song helped break the Who as stars in the United States, giving them a Top Ten hit in late 1967. "I swoon when I hear the sound," boasted Townshend in Rolling Stone. "The words, which aging senators have called 'drug oriented,' are about a jealous man with exceptionally good eyesight. Honest."