Like Dando’s Lemonheads, Ryan Adams’s Whiskeytown were a ’90s band who came close. Hailed as the outfit bound to break alt-country to the masses, the North Carolina group were signed by the long-gone Geffen imprint Outpost on the strength of their 1996 indie debut, Faithless Street (Mood Food), which was reissued by Outpost in 1998 with nearly a dozen bonus tracks, some from an EP and others that had already found their way, in different versions, onto Whiskeytown’s Outpost debut, 1997’s Stranger’s Almanac. That was the album that was supposed to make Adams a star. Instead, he built a pain-in-the-ass reputation for himself. By 1999, Whiskeytown were no more.

Now Geffen has resurrected Stranger’s Almanac as a “Deluxe Edition” two-disc set that adds five spirited live-in-the-studio performances to the disc’s original 13 tracks and then collects 21 odds and sods — all but two of which were previously unreleased — on a second CD. This is the model for what one of these reissues should look like. For starters, it’s an album that, like Ray, deserves a second listen. Beyond that, there’s just a ton of Whiskeytown material — good stuff — that never saw the official light of day. Sure, half a dozen of the previously unreleased tracks are simply demos or “early versions” of tunes that ended up on the final version of Stranger’s Almanac. But unlike Dando’s sloppy solo-acoustic takes on Ray, these more fully fleshed-out demos offer insight into the band’s creative process, and they’re just the sort of thing that hardcore fans love to get their hands on. Now all the major labels need to do is figure out a way to get material like this to fans before those fans find a way to download the tracks themselves. I wish them luck.