The Best Alt-Country Albums of the '90s

Six years and at least two scrapped versions went into it, with Steve Earle and Roy Bittan among the credited producers by the end. Drunken Angel is a eulogy for the Austin songwriter Blaze Foley, and the way she lets the word angel fray at the edges is the whole record's method. It topped the 1998 Pazz & Jop critics' poll and won the contemporary folk Grammy.

Their only major-label record, cut live to tape in Austin with Brian Paulson producing — no overdubs anywhere on it. Doug Sahm walks in to sing his own Give Back the Key to My Heart, and The Long Cut has Tweedy already writing the choruses Wilco would run on. Farrar quit within months, which makes this the sound of a band splitting in real time.

A double album sold at single-CD price because Tweedy gave back royalty points to convince Reprise to do it. Misunderstood opens the thing with the band trading instruments over a feedback squall before settling into piano balladry — the exact hinge where alt-country tips into indie rock, flagged as such. Nineteen songs, and the sprawl is the point.

Farrar's first move after the split, produced by Brian Paulson for Warner Bros. Windfall is the thesis statement — switching it over to AM, a fiddle-and-steel benediction for night driving — while Drown got the band actual rock radio play. Where Tweedy chased noise, Farrar doubled down on Appalachian drone, and this is the purest distillation either of them managed.

Recorded for about $3,500 at Fort Apache in Boston with Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, and released on tiny Rockville Records in 1990. Graveyard Shift opens at hardcore tempo and then drops into a country lope mid-song, the whole genre in one arrangement. The Carter Family title ended up naming the magazine and the movement. Spotify has only the 2003 Legacy reissue, which appends demos and a live acoustic Whiskey Bottle to the original thirteen.

Geffen's Outpost imprint signed Whiskeytown on the strength of Faithless Street, and Jim Scott produced this one clean enough to scare the punks. 16 Days hangs Ryan Adams's cracked lead against Caitlin Cary's harmony and fiddle, the pairing that made the band. Adams was twenty-two and already writing like the burnout he was pretending to be.

Two voices and two guitars, produced by T Bone Burnett and nominated for the contemporary folk Grammy. Orphan Girl had already reached Emmylou Harris before this came out, but the original is starker — David Rawlings's harmony sits a hair above Welch's melody and never blinks. Originally an Almo Sounds release; Spotify's copy sits on her own Acony label, same 1996 tracklist.

Daniel Lanois produced it in a New Orleans house and pushed Harris's voice through the same fogged reverb he gave U2, which appalled Nashville and won the 1996 contemporary folk Grammy anyway. Where Will I Be opens on Lanois's tremolo guitar with the drums mixed like weather. Border case by pedigree, but every alt-country record after it borrowed this atmosphere.

George Drakoulias heard the band by accident — playing down the line while he was on the phone to Twin/Tone on other business — and signed them to Def American. Waiting for the Sun rides Gary Louris's overdriven leads under his and Mark Olson's blood-close harmony, two voices that blur into one. Proof the Gram Parsons lineage survived the '80s.

Pop construction replaced the live band: Jay Bennett and Tweedy built these tracks in the studio out of Mellotrons, tack piano and stacked overdubs, and the rest of Wilco barely features. Via Chicago starts with a murder dream sung like a lullaby, drums detonating politely underneath. Border case going the other way — barely country at all, and essential anyway.

Blue is the one everybody knows — two-part harmony over strummed acoustic, a chorus about being left that radio somehow declined — and Miss Williams' Guitar is Olson's love song to Victoria Williams, whom he quit the band for later that year. Drakoulias produced again for American. Spotify renders the title as Tomorrow The Green Grass, capital The.

Fresh out of jail and rehab, Earle cut this for his own E-Squared imprint, the second record of his post-prison run after the acoustic Train a Comin'. CCKMP is the bleakest thing here — solo, modal, cocaine cannot kill my pain delivered without self-pity — and Lucinda Williams duets on You're Still Standin' There. The comeback nobody in Nashville was betting on.

Elektra took the Dallas quartet to an adobe studio in Tornillo, Texas, and got the loudest record the movement produced. Timebomb opens it at punk speed with Rhett Miller singing a hook the size of a billboard, and the rhythm section never lets up from there. Cowpunk's last, best argument. Spotify capitalises the title as Too Far To Care.

Brian Henneman roadied for Uncle Tupelo before fronting his own band, and Eric Roscoe Ambel produced this second Bottle Rockets record for East Side Digital before Atlantic picked it up. Radar Gun is small-town menace played for laughs — a cop giddy over his new toy, guitars gunning like the cruiser. The class politics most of the movement only gestured at, done plainly.