“I think I home in on that era,” the 47-year-old explains, “because that’s the era I grew up listening to music, and that’s the era where songwriting was the best, and the production was the most interesting and creative — and things weren’t formulaic. They were new and vibrant, unlike they are now, to me.”
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AUTHENTICITY: Former alt-country supergroup Golden Smog have shed their self-appointed “roots” for their real ones. |
It’s a common sentiment in one prominent shard of the aging and fragmented alt-country vanguard. On their first album in eight years, Another Fine Day, the members of formerly alt-country supergroup Golden Smog have also shed their self-appointed “roots” for their real ones. On the surface, this mishmash of ’60s genre exercises and loose mood experiments by Gary Louris and Mark Perlman (the Jayhawks), Dan Murphy (Soul Asylum), Kraig Johnson (Run Westy Run), and occasionally Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) is accomplished and enticing. But listen close and few cuts get as far as, say, the meaningless but beguiling ’60s stew dished out by the New Pornographers (the escape vehicle from the alt-country label for diva Neko Case).Tim O’Reagan and Golden Smog are both on the major-affiliated Lost Highway Records. Although label president Luke Lewis has made it the home for alt-country’s biggest icons, from Lucinda Williams to Ryan Adams, he prefers the broader “singer-songwriter” trademark. “We always hoped that we had a brand,” he says over the phone from his Nashville office, “that people could at least know that — oh shit, this is tricky — that the artists can read. Anyway, look, I don’t think that somebody can count on picking up a Lost Highway record and sonically hearing alt-country all the time. But hopefully, you know, it’s got other kinds of cred.”
For Nan Warshaw, co-owner of Bloodshot Records, establishing that cred has meant appealing to the indie-rock world that she sees as her true base. “These days alt-country is a straitjacket,” she says from Chicago. “I’m still getting tons of demos, the good ones of which sound like the records we put out five or 10 years ago. I want something new and different.”
Sure enough, there are plenty of new and different niche twists out there. Maybe Bloodshot’s long-running Bottle Rockets aren’t tilling new fields with their straightforward Midwestern rock on Zoysia, but the Drive-By Truckers’ recent A Blessing and a Curse (New West) continues a string of Southern-rock-steeped releases that has amassed fans as steadily as accolades. Grant Alden also hears new possibilities in a slew of young hippie kids playing in “sort-of post-punk string bands,” and he notes that the all-acoustic Old Crow Medicine Show sold 110,000 copies of their homonymous 2004 debut on Nettwerk.
So might alt-country’s seeming breakdown into loosely overlapping niche markets lead, in Luke Lewis’s words, to “the genius shit, which winds up being an amalgamation of things”? Alejandro Escovedo isn’t quite there on The Boxing Mirror (Backporch/EMI), but this No Depression “Artist of the ’90s” has never roamed so confidently across the disparate styles of his long career, from punk to alt-country to chamber pop. That’s a credit to his new marriage and to surviving a near-death illness, but speaking by cellphone as his tour bus approached home base in Austin, he also cites the support of that old alt-country mecca, where now “you’ll find every genre of music, from blues to country to punk rock to whatever it is that people are doing.”
