Anyone with more than a passing interest in Stevie Wonder's career-defining run of records for Tamla in the early '70s should know all about Syreeta. Born Syreeta Wright in Pittsburgh, PA in 1946, she worked as a receptonist for Motown before going on to record material for the label, eventually coming within a whisker of joining The Supremes when Diana Ross flew the coop in 1970.

Wright began dating Wonder in 1969 and started writing material with the soul legend at his prompting, a creative partnership which quickly bore fruit with 24-carat numbers like 'Signed, Sealed Delivered' and 'It's A Shame', which became a hit for The Detroit Spinners in 1970. Even more significantly, her work with Wonder on Where I'm Coming From and Music Of My Mind helped establish the far-reaching blueprint that saw him score his greatest successes during the early part of that decade.

While their marriage hit the rocks in 1972, the pair continued to work together with frequently stunning results, Wright's own career as a solo artist peaking with the same year's Syreeta and especially 1974's Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta. The latter can boast pop masterclasses of the calibre of 'Come Get This Stuff' (originally written by Wonder for Rufus & Chaka Khan), incendiary political ire in 'I'm Goin' Left', and, in 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers', a post-break up song that poses the million-dollar question with grace and characteristic generosity: "'cause we've ended now as lovers / does our love for one another have to end?"

Hats off to Jens Lekman for the heads up on Javiera Mena, the Chilean pop siren with whom he collaborated earlier this year. We don't know much about the songwriter, except that she released her debut, Esquemas Juveniles, which was rapturously received by an eagle-eyed few back in 2006.

She followed it up in April this year with Mena, a record that plunged head-first into all things electro, disco and Italo, emerging with an absolutely stellar set of productions with the unabashed pop edge of Robyn and the niche cool of recent revivalist darlings like Glass Candy and Nite Jewel. But with more depth than any of the above.

Seriously, you need this record in your life.

...and here's the Jens duet: ...and here's an older track more in the pop classicist tradition, with a stately ripple of piano and generous, softly unfolding melody. Oh hark at us, we've gone all gushing:

Linda Perhacs worked as a dental hygienist for the likes of Cary Grant and Paul Newman until her music was discovered by another client in Hollywood composer Leonard Roseman. She cut her one and only record in 1970, the eerily beautiful Parallelograms, before melting back into obscurity and returning to her former profession.

With an acoustic, gently psychedelic sound owing a clear debt of influence to Joni Mitchell, Perhacs' music had a stark resonance all of its own, scaling cosmic peaks with the the endlessly strange (and exceedingly trippy) title track.

A steady cult attached itself to her name over the intervening years, culminating in a reissue of Parallelograms on the Wild Places imprint in 2008. She has fans in high places, too, including Flying Lotus, Devendra Banhart and - somewhat improbably - Daft Punk, who included her song 'If You Were My Man' in their film Electroma.

An absolute stunner of a track it is, too, sounding not unlike The Carpenters with none of the kitsch and all of the soul brought nakedly to the fore.