Heart Full of Soul

There is a fuzzed-out riff at the center of this song that sounds like it was recorded in a different century from anything around it — not blues, not pop, not rock quite, something hovering between all three with an almost sitar-adjacent buzz that Jeff Beck coaxed out of an electric guitar before anyone had a vocabulary for what he was doing. The song moves at a deliberate, unhurried pace that gives that central riff room to breathe and unsettle. Keith Relf's vocal is slightly detached, observational, describing emotional need from a remove that makes the need feel stranger and more vivid than direct expression would. What makes this a landmark is the texture — that guitar sound had not been heard before in British rock, and it opened a door toward psychedelia and Eastern-influenced rock that the rest of the decade would walk through. The production keeps things relatively spare, which lets the unusual sonic elements land with full impact. It is a song about longing, but the longing is expressed through sound rather than through the lyric, which is why it still feels modern. Reach for this in the late afternoon when the light is doing something strange and you want music that sounds like it arrived from somewhere slightly sideways from where you are standing.