hayden, Ginger, thank you so much for those suggestions. That'll keep me busy for a good long while, and I really appreciate the editorial commentary so I can suss out with which I want to start.

And at the risk of turning this into the literary thread:

Oh yeah! The writing is sometimes painfully beautiful, and the story is pretty much The Greatest Story Ever Told.

I wrote a paper in college comparing Moby-Dick to Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, another much maligned but stunningly powerful book. There are so many structural and stylistic parallels, it's incredible to think that Melville and Woolf never met and talked shop. Moby-Dick is the link between the mid-to-late 19th century American Literary Renaissance (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne) and early 20th century British Modernism (Woolf, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot). I highly recommend To The Lighthouse to you if you haven't already read it--I think you'll love it.

OK, no more out-of-place book talk from me.

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Leaping ahead to say that a new Magnetic Fields album ("I") and a new Stephen Sondheim recording ("Bounce", a musical that didn't make it to Broadway last year) are scheduled for release May 4th.

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Comments from the peanut gallery on the alt-country recs.

Wilco - AM. Very Tupeloesque with songs that distill much of the later UT sounds down to fine points.

I didn't hear Tupelo as strongly as you do in this, or in any of their stuff. Wilco's the sort of band I want to love, but actually don't.

Far, far better -- Mermaid Avenue, with Wilco and Billy Bragg putting music to Woody Guthrie's words. Not alt-country per se, but folkie rock is definitely one of the streams that feeds into the genre.

Lambchop - Nixon. Chamber alt-country. There's, like, 11-12 members of this band, and their sound is as lush as it is twangy.

Another band that does nothing for me. My friend Mark's pithy description of them -- "Richard Nixon singing in front of your high school's orchestra."

Vic Chesnutt - The Salesman & Bernadette (or any of his albums, really). Vic's a weirdo like Victoria Williams. Lambchop backs him up on this.

The Salesman & Bernadette would be a suboptimal introduction to Vic -- it's not much like the rest of his oeuvre (and, see above, re Lambchop). I'd recommend Is The Actor Happy? or About to Choke instead, with Silver Lake as a later purchase once you've fallen in love with his sensibility.

Freakwater - Old Paint

Springtime is my favorite.

The Waco Brothers - Electric Waco Chair. Raucous.

Gah! No, no -- Cowboy in Flames. Their best album. Also, the Do You Think About Me CD, for their covers of "Revolution Blues" and the title track.

The Pine Valley Cosmonauts - The Executioner's Last Songs. The menu approach.

Best PVC to my mind is still Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills. A bit less all over the place, but everyone appears to their best advantage.

Kasey Chambers - The Captain

I stopped listening to this five songs in because I was bored so badly by it.

Should also have added Kelly Hogan's Beneath The Country Underdog.

Damn straight.

Also, you left out --

• Bad Livers, Dust on the Bible and Hogs on the Highway -- punks turn to bluegrass, with a tuba.

• Old 97's -- Too Far To Care. Where alt-country would have broken big on the pop/rock charts, if it ever had.

• Whiskeytown -- You cannot tell the story of alt-country in the 90s without mentioning Whiskeytown and Ryan Adams. Strangers Almanac is a great album -- and, there are posters for it up all over Sunnydale High in S2 of Buffy, so there's a connection. Adams's solo stuff is a mixed bag, but his Heartbreaker CD is beautiful and raw.

• The Knitters -- Poor Little Critter on the Road. 1985. X goes country. Kids all over America go "hey!" The founders of Bloodshot Records are inspired. And it rocks.

• Minutemen -- Double Nickels on the Dime
  
• The Replacements -- Tim
  

If we're gonna get in to the roots of the sound, you want to be listening to bands like this, which added country to the mix of a mid-to-late 80s punk sound.

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I've never read the Wolff book, Jen. Thanks for the recommendation!

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Betsy -- yeah, I saw TMF at NYU recently. All the songs on the new CD start with "I," hence the name.

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Replying to Misha:

Wilco's the sort of band I want to love, but actually don't.

I like them a lot better when they leave the alt-country in the dust and set out for Brian Wilson & Neil Young territory. A.M. is my least favorite of their albums, but it has some solid contributions on there ("Passenger Side" and "Pick Up The Change", for instance) which seem direct, but actually have clever lyrics and odd chord changes.

Far, far better -- Mermaid Avenue, with Wilco and Billy Bragg putting music to Woody Guthrie's words. Not alt-country per se, but folkie rock is definitely one of the streams that feeds into the genre.

Yeah, Mermaid Avenue rocks. Not Mermaid Avenue II, though, unfortunately.

Lambchop. Another band that does nothing for me. My friend Mark's pithy description of them -- "Richard Nixon singing in front of your high school's orchestra."

I hear Charlie Rich's countrypolitan phase with Mark Eitzel on vocals.

The Salesman & Bernadette would be a suboptimal introduction to Vic -- it's not much like the rest of his oeuvre (and, see above, re Lambchop). I'd recommend Is The Actor Happy? or About to Choke instead, with Silver Lake as a later purchase once you've fallen in love with his sensibility.

Yeah, but I think TS&B may be the only one in print. For the record, I'd also recommend any of the three albums Misha recommended.

Springtime is my favorite.

You crazy. Old Paint is better.

Gah! No, no -- Cowboy in Flames. Their best album. Also, the Do You Think About Me CD, for their covers of "Revolution Blues" and the title track.

Take her word over mine here, too.

Best PVC to my mind is still Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills. A bit less all over the place, but everyone appears to their best advantage.

Out o' print, too.

I'm also not a Kasey Chambers fan.

Bad Livers, yes. Old 97's, yes. Whiskeytown, yes. But only Stranger's Almanac. The Knitters, yes.

Trailer Bride is also a fun alt-country band. And, as David will tell you, Southern Culture on the Skids is mandatory.

And the Minutemen and Replacements, not just yes, but HELL YEAH.

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I don't know much alt-country, so here are my most recent CD acquistions:

Our Lady Peace - Spiritual Machines
Tara MacLean - Passenger
Moist - Creature
Beth Orton - Daybreaker
Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
Sam Roberts - We Were Born in a Flame
Jump, Little Children - Magazine
Leah Andreone - Veiled
Emm Gryner - Public

Those first six I got during a Half-Price binge buy a month ago, and nearly all (besides the OLP) were based on friends' recommendations. Most, I'd heard maybe one or two songs. A few, I'd never even heard a song by the band. The Emm I finally got this weekend.

I'm also not a Kasey Chambers fan.

The only song I know is "Crossfire," and it's not bad. It's got amusing lines like "I take a raincheck and I never ever check the rain."

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I don't like the second Kasey Chambers album, which is, in fact, boring, but I thought the first one was interesting. It's not a desert island album, but I think it's a good one for someone interested in where alt-country is now. (I may be influenced by the fact that she's really good live.) Besides, Kasey Chambers was raised by wolves. I'll admit I live in a quirky region of alt-country, the part bordered by Americana and folk.

If you can only get one thing that people have recommended, get Townes Van Zandt.

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Mission of Burma fans: Matador just put up this neat e-card.

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Salute the Majesty... is not only not out of print, it's on sale at the Bloodshot site for $10. They give free US shipping too.

[link]

About To Choke is in sotck at Amazon, and looking it up has directed me a CD I missed called Left To His Own Devices that I'm gonna have to check out as well. And you can buy a signed tape of Is The Actor Happy? from Vic directly: [link]

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