Some songs are protests. Others are warnings. But a rare few are something else entirely: they are stories that transport you to another place, another time, another possible future. Ted Stanley’s “Shoreline” is one of those songs. It’s a piece of music that feels less like a song and more like a modern myth, a folktale carried softly across a rising tide. It’s a story...

Jimmy Scott Free’s return with “Turn Back Time,” featuring the potent vocals of Kim English, is a peculiar kind of exorcism. It’s a track with a passport full of stamps—born of a Southend sensibility, aged in Barcelona, and now arriving on our shores—yet its emotional core is stuck stubbornly in a single, unchangeable moment. This is a song that tells you to dance while...