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.

“Highwayman” gathers four of country music’s most unmistakable voices — Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash — and lets each one take a turn as the same restless soul reborn across the centuries. Released in 1985, it gave the supergroup its name and a number one single, with Cash closing the song as a starship pilot still wandering, still unfinished.

Released in 1977, Refavela is the album Gilberto Gil made after returning from FESTAC '77 in Lagos. The middle panel of his Refazenda–Refavela–Realce trilogy, it trades the agrarian openness of the first record for the dense, syncretic life of the Brazilian periphery, refracted through a freshly encountered West Africa.

There are songs that belong to rooms, and there are songs that belong to the road. America's "Ventura Highway" is of the latter kind — a song that seems to have been written not at a desk but behind the wheel, somewhere between the last town and the next horizon. Released in 1972 on their album Homecoming, the track is a sun-drenched reverie, all fingerpicked guitars and unhurried harmonies, drifting along like the very breeze it describes.