(1) Cat Power, Dark End of the Street (Matador). Six numbers left over from Jukebox, her deadly covers collection from 2008, but with every song here—most deeply with her version of Brendan Behan’s “The Auld Triangle”—the slow ache of Chan Marshall’s voice comes through like a promise that might take her a lifetime to keep.

(2/3) KT Tunstall, “Little Favours,” from Drastic Fantastic (Virgin, 2007), and “Mr. Fritter,” “The Tunstallator” (YouTube). So fierce on its own terms, as Tunstall’s voice wraps itself around her own body; in another life it opens up into a bizarre video, credited to an “ex-teacher,” a slightly balding man of about thirty-five who’ll turn out to be a cross between Terence Stamp in The Collector, whoever killed the Black Dahlia, and your everyday bondage fetishist. “I just want to show you something I’ve been building for the last few months,” he says before he beckons you into his house to show you a life-size puppet topped by a rotating box of Tunstall faces with an ugly slashed mouth. After jerking the strings on the mouth, on the metal hook that serves as the hand on the plastic guitar, and the body, all in sync to the music—precisely, which only makes it worse—the man, silently singing along with the drumbeat that opens the record, ties the strings around his own face as he kneels before his idol, just like Ed Gein draping the faces of the women he killed over his own. And the song still sounds glorious.

(4) Irma Thomas, “Wish Someone Would Care,” from Soul Queen of New Orleans (Mardi Gras) or Swamp Dogg Present Two Phases of Irma Thomas (S.D.E.G.)  Not the quiet original, from 1964, the saddest song that ever hit Top 40, but a shouting version cut in 1973 with the eccentric soul singer Swamp Dogg at the controls, re-produced by him twenty years after that—turning up now late in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for a few moments in a diner late at night, as if from somewhere in the back, maybe a dishwasher singing to herself and keeping time off the beat by banging on the counter with a fork.

(5) Orioles, “Crying in the Chapel” in Revolutionary Road, dir. Sam Mendes (soundtrack album on Nonesuch)  Hidden in this adaptation of a 1961 novel about spiritual death in the suburbs of New York in 1955—a book that would never be mentioned today if it had been set in Michigan or California—is one strange scene.  Leonardo DiCaprio’s self-loathing business-machine promotion man Frank Wheeler sits in his cubicle...