The figure that opens it was meant to be a man. Townshend’s plan for Lifehouse was to feed Meher Baba’s vital signs and personality into a synthesiser and let the machine make music out of the data. What ended up on tape is a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ with its marimba repeat switched on, cycling a handful of notes in a mode borrowed from the minimalist Terry Riley — Baba plus Riley, hence the title, and hence an album that opens with a keyboard preset left running. It spends the next five minutes building towards something. I have never settled whether it arrives: the song withholds the climax it keeps promising, and then hands it to someone who wasn’t in the band.

The wallet came out of the fire. Robert Smith has told the story more than one way, but the version that stuck is this: a fire went through his home, and when he went back over what was left he found his wallet, and in it the photographs of Mary — the girl he had met at fourteen at St Wilfrid’s in Crawley and married in August 1988. One of those pictures is the single sleeve. The song is what happens when you look at a photograph for long enough — I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / That I almost believe that they’re real — and on the album it takes him seven and a half minutes to say so.

Kate Bush bought the book knowing nothing about it, which she has said she had never done before — it was just calling her from the shelf. Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams is a son’s account of growing up at Orgonon, his father’s 175-acre place in Rangeley, Maine, where the two of them pointed a machine at the sky and tried to pull rain down out of it. The father was Wilhelm Reich, convicted of contempt in 1956 and dead in a federal prison by the following November. The song is the boy, grown up, still on the hill.

De La Soul’s second album opens by burying the first one — a broken pot of daisies on the sleeve, and a running skit in which a kid pulls the cassette out of the trash, has it taken off him by bullies, and then has to listen to them slag off every track on it. Somewhere in the middle of all that contempt sits four minutes of undefended sunshine. It starts with a station ID for WRMS, a radio station that does not exist, read by Russell Simmons in the flat patter of a man reading a station ID, and then he hands over to Q-Tip.

On 9 February 1971 the Sylmar earthquake hit the San Fernando Valley in the early morning, and later that day Jimmy Page flew into Los Angeles with engineer Andy Johns to mix an album that already contained a song about California shaking itself apart. Aftershocks were still arriving. Page listened to what he had on tape, heard Robert Plant sing about the mountains and the canyons starting to tremble, and quietly decided to mix that one last — no point, as he saw it, in tempting the ground twice. Johns told him not to be so bloody stupid.

Nothing about this record is warm. The drums are a machine, the guitar is all treble and slapback, the synthesizer hangs over the top like glare coming off a windshield — and somehow it is the most convincing song anyone made in the 1980s about a summer being over. Don Henley wrote the words. The music arrived already finished, on a home demo Mike Campbell had built around a LinnDrum he had only just bought.

Jimmy Webb sent the tape over unfinished. Two verses, no third, no bridge — and a skull and crossbones drawn on the note, so nobody could later claim they hadn’t been warned. Glen Campbell recorded it anyway. When Webb ran into him a few days later and started explaining all over again that the song wasn’t done, Campbell pulled an acetate out of his bag: “Well, it is now.”

For four records Timber Timbre traded in dread — reverb-soaked, gothic, Taylor Kirk singing like he’s watching you from across a dark room. On the title track of 2014’s Hot Dreams he keeps the dark room and changes what happens in it. The menace is still there; it has just been asked to slow-dance.

There is something perverse and wonderful about opening a record by holding a funeral for the band that made it. “Okkervil River R.I.P.” is the first track on Away (ATO, 2016), and Will Sheff spends its seven minutes burying the project whose name is on the sleeve — gently, unhurriedly, and with the strange lightness that arrives only once you have stopped pretending a thing can be saved.

Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” is one of those rare songs that turns the ordinary into something quietly miraculous. Released in 1992 on The Predator, it trades the confrontational fury Cube had built his name on for a single, almost tender daydream: a day in South Central where nothing goes wrong.