“Little Wing” by Jimi Hendrix

"Little Wing" comes from Axis: Bold as Love, the Jimi Hendrix Experience's second album, released in the UK in December 1967, and it gets everything said in about two and a half minutes. Hendrix had been working it up since his Greenwich Village days, tracing it back to a 1966 R&B session, and finished it that October after the Monterey Pop Festival fired him up.

It's a slow, R&B-soaked ballad for an idealized woman who seems half girlfriend, half guardian angel, with Hendrix's guitar floating in studio effects and a glockenspiel twinkling behind him while Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell tread softly. The Experience kept it in their live set, and a stage version turned up on Hendrix in the West in 1972. It has since become a standard, and Rolling Stone placed it at 357 on its list of the greatest songs in 2004.

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