On a break from recording the first new Roxy Music album since 1982, Bryan Ferry cut a whole disc of Bob Dylan covers. The Smoking Section’s verdict? Suave and seductive, just like Ferry himself. “If Not for You” gets the Avalon space-age-soul treatment, and elsewhere on Dylanesque (out in June), Ferry puts his own stamp on songs like “Positively 4th Street,” “All I Really Want to Do” and “Simple Twist of Fate.” “The early-period songs are what I feel most drawn to,” he tells the S.S. “That’s where Dylan is perhaps at his most poetic.” Our favorite cut? “Gates of Eden,” of course. “It’s got the most beautiful surrealist imagery,” seconds Ferry. “Each verse has its own little world. It’s a mesmerizing, haunting song.” Yep, and wait till you
hear Mr. Ferry do it!

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When the S.S. crept into Studio D at Sony Studios in New York, Björk stood amid seven French horns, belting out her latest song, “Pneumonia.” Barefoot, she seemed possessed by an otherworldly spirit, contorting her body to perfectly bend notes like only one lil’ Icelander can. “Now I’m trembling,” she told us afterward in the control room. “It’s like childbirth.” Björk was at Sony to lay down two tracks (”Trance” is the other), each a potential closer for her upcoming album, Volta. B started Volta in the autumn of 2005, focusing on creating a different mood than on her previous two discs, Medúlla and Vespertine. “I felt I was ready to be an extrovert again,” she says. “Apart from that, I just wanted to have fun.” Though she says that ninety percent of Volta was born from her sitting in front of a computer editing brass and tribal beats, the “extroverted” portion came when she invited collaborators. For instance, “Dull Flame” is a charming duet with Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons); for “Hope” she traveled to Mali to record with kora player Toumani Diabaté; and on the first single, “Earth Intruders,” B teams up with Timbaland and the Congolese group Konono No. 1.

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The British-born, Gotham-raised DJ-producer extraordinaire Mark Ronson worked magic on albums by Christina Aguilera and Lily Allen, but his ability to capture the long-lost sounds of Motown and Stax on Amy Winehouse’s new record, Back to Black, is the stuff of legend. Ronson’s got a U.K. solo disc, Version, which features songs by Coldplay (”God Put a Smile Upon Your Face”), the Smiths (”Stop Me”) and Britney Spears (”Toxic”), recorded from scratch, with arrangements that hearken back to classic soul. Allen sings the Kaiser Chiefs‘ “Oh My God,” and Ronson transforms the Kings of Leon’s “Pistol of Fire” into a Sly Stone-style brass explosion. “It sounds like ‘Dance to the Music’ — with tons of horns,” he says. While you wait on a U.S. release, Ronson’s MySpace page will whet your appetite.