To listen to Stevie Hawkins’ take on "A Song For You" is to have a conversation with a ghost in a dimly lit room after the show has ended. Hawkins, long the rhythmic engine for the song's originator Leon Russell, steps from behind the drum kit to the microphone, and the space between these two roles compresses decades into four and a half minutes....

Listening to Zov.yay’s new single, “No Watches,” is like catching yourself forgetting what day of the week it is, and then deciding you quite like it. There’s a distinct feeling of unshouldering here, a shedding of temporal anxiety. Zov.yay’s flow is less a performance and more a conversation you’ve walked into, a comfortable, self-assured account of having arrived somewhere important without having watched the...