alterna2 · CC BY 2.0

Jonathan Richman founded the Modern Lovers in 1970, whose deadpan, unadorned songs about cars and loneliness anticipated punk rock years before the genre had a name and went on to influence bands from the Talking Heads onward. He then abandoned the amplified rock sound almost entirely, spending the following decades performing solo or with spare acoustic backing, singing in a wide-eyed, unaffected voice that owed nothing to the irony fashionable around him. His catalogue draws on music from around the world rather than staying inside rock's usual borders.