To prepare for a career-spanning interview with Joe Jackson is to go from being merely overwhelmed by his catalogue — 21 studio albums, 10 live albums — to just about drowning in it. What’s daunting isn’t just the number of recordings he’s made over the last 40 years, but the variety: rock, pop, ska, classical, jump blues, swing, jazz, and plenty more that defies categorization.

“You can’t kill humor. Every tyrant in history has tried, has hated to be mocked, so they try to suppress humor in some way. And it doesn’t work in the end.” – Joe Jackson

The reason Jackson writes music in so many styles, as his 1999 memoir A Cure For Gravity makes clear, is that he grew up influenced by most everything he heard. First there were two giants of classical and jazz composition respectively: Beethoven, the third symphony, especially, and Duke Ellington (Jackson devoted an entire album to his music).

Then there were the most stylish songwriters of the generation just preceding him: Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Speaking of the latter duo, Jackson told NewsHour Weekend that, “before I heard them, I didn’t know that you could do, like, melodic pop-type music, and have success with a wide audience, and have it also be sophisticated.”

Sophisticated songwriting abounds in Jackson’s work, though his last bona fide hit song was You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want) from 1984’s Body and Soul. That album was his last to crack the US top 25 until he finally pulled it off again with his February 2019 release, Fool. But his records from the mid-80s till the present are full of songs that deserved a better fate.

Here’s a sampling, or listen to the full playlist on Spotify.