For Fans of Eric Clapton

Unplugged is what most people know, and it is a genuinely beautiful record. But the actual entry point to understanding what Clapton does is Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the Derek and the Dominos double album from 1970. It is messier, hungrier, and more desperate than anything on Unplugged, and it captures a musician playing like his life depends on it, which at that point it more or less did. The title track alone repays years of listening.

Clapton's 1980s work gets dismissed as pop compromise, and some of it earns that reputation. But Money and Cigarettes (1983) and Behind the Sun (1985) are better records than their reputations suggest, particularly when you hear them as documents of a man trying to hold himself together through craft. August, produced by Phil Collins, is the one people argue about most; it is slicker than anything around it but the playing never lies.

J.J. Cale, who wrote After Midnight and Cocaine, is the musician Clapton himself credits as the defining influence on his rhythmic sensibility: relaxed, unhurried, the groove doing more work than the pyrotechnics. Cale outlived his own influence on Clapton by decades, and their 2006 collaboration The Road to Escondido is the clearest evidence of what that lineage sounds like when the two men play together. Among living players, Gary Clark Jr. is the closest thing to a direct heir.

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars (2017), directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, is an unusually candid piece of work. Clapton cooperated fully and the film does not flinch from the addiction years, the family tragedies, the periods of artistic drift. It is not a hagiography. If you want to understand why the emotional rawness in the music is not an affectation, this is where to start.