Dayna Kurtz ‎– Beautiful Yesterday (2004)

Dayna Kurtz is the kind of artist who inspires wild-eyed zealotry among her fans, and there are 3 reasons for it: 1, she's an artist's artist, one whose whiskeyed, determined alto often earns her comparisons with Nina Simone; 2 while Europeans adore her, she's obscenely underappreciated in her own country; and 3, her songs straddle a difficult space between jazz, rock, and folk, & are pure poetry.