![]() Shelby Lynne: Identity Crisis (2003) The appropriately titled Identity Crisis is by far the most eclectic record Lynne’s ever made. There’s nary a dud on this one, each song a gem and strong enough to satiate country fans with a sense of adventure. By the time Green On Red released Gas Food Lodging in 1985, they’d begun sneaking more elements of country music-a la The Byrds-into their music, while still retaining their jangly pop prowess. The move inched them closer to the Paisley Underground with the likes of Dream Syndicate, The Three O’Clock, as well as Thin White Rope up in Davis, California. Green On Red: Gas Food Lodging (1985) After getting their start in Tuscon, Arizona’s punk scene, Green On Red moved to Los Angeles and expanded their sound to incorporate country and psych-pop influences. Instead he presents the listener-as he does on all the album’s songs-with the unsatisfying reality that life is a package deal, a series of tradeoffs, and leaves us to draw our own conclusions. On “Sake of the Song,” over an organ-fueled Memphis blues, he sings: “Hitchhiking, bus riding, rental cars, living rooms, coffee houses, run-down bars, 10,000 people or alone under the stars, it’s all for the sake of the song.” As the number sprawls across a dozen verses, Carll tallies up all the pluses and minuses of the music life-the “record deals and trained seals” and the chance to “tell your truth however you choose”-but refuses to conclude that one outweighs the other. That consciousness was always lurking in the background of Carll’s songs, but here it comes into the foreground. Into the spaces where the stomping and joking once were comes a sobering awareness of the losses that shadow every life. It’s a more thoughtful collection-with the choruses more likely to contain epiphanies than punchlines. It’s a quieter album, recorded mostly with a stripped-down trio-with occasional splashes of keys and steel added here and there. Hayes Carll: Lovers and Leavers (2016) Lovers and Leavers is the finest work of Hayes Carll’s career, even if it’s very different from what came before. Think of Life on Earth as a guide for staying alive and going to ground even when it seems like there’s no ground to go to: From the very first song, “Wolves,” Segarra appears to be giving their listeners tools for evading danger and death. With Segarra’s newfound sense of self and a new outlook on life and the world comes a new sound, and a new mission, both related to the old but attuned to the moment. It’s rare for a record so deep in a band’s discography to function as a fresh start after establishing a style, not to mention a personality, over so many years. Hurray for the Riff Raff: Life on Earth (2022) Life on Earth, the seventh album by New Orleans-via-New York folk-blues-punk project Hurray for the Riff Raff, is reinvention with a caveat: Singer/songwriter and frontperson Alynda Segarra has taken such leaps over the last decade and a half as a human being, as well as a musician, that their efforts on Life on Earth express reinvention less than they do rebirth. Here are the 70 Best Alt-Country Albums of All Time:ħ0. We’ve limited our selections to two per band, otherwise the entire Uncle Tupelo catalog would be here. The following 70 albums span nearly four decades of alt-country and stretch the limits of “whatever that is.” We easily could have picked 100, and we’d love to hear your favorites that we missed. And the genre shows no signs of letting up, with last year’s album of the year and this year’s album of the year so far both making this list. The ’90s kicked off with the first album from Uncle Tupelo, No Depression (released 33 years ago today), which became synonymous with “alt-country” thanks to the magazine of the same name. But 1985 was really a watershed moment for the genre with Green on Red, Jason & The Scorchers and Mekons all exploring traditional country through the lens of punk rock. The alt-country movement had plenty of pre-cursors in the folk-rock of Gram Parsons and the renegade country of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. There are a lot of albums we love that fit somewhere just outside of that. As we update this list that we first created in 2016, we try to continue to thread the needle between indie folk and straight-up country with Big Thief and Angel Olson framing one edge and Kasey Musgraves and The Highwomen framing the other. Alt-country is such a hard genre to define that the wonderful music magazine devoted to it proclaimed itself the “alternative-country (whatever that is) bi-monthly.” For our best alt-country albums list, we’ve chosen to focus on albums with significant country elements operating outside of the mainstream country music industry.
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