
Grant Alden


FOUNDERS KEEPERS: The Bottle Rockets and The Legacy of Misfits Piecing Together a Living
This is going to be about The Bottle Rockets, the other alt-country band from St. Louis, that graced the cover of the original magazine twice (even though the second time we all knew the futility of the gesture).
But it's going to take a while to get there.

FOUNDERS KEEPERS: After the Fire is Gone; The Last Sessions of Bluesman Elmore James
It began here, in the safety of the suburbs, black vinyl spinning in someone's back room, George Harrison bragging on John Lennon during the bridge in the Beatles' “For You Blue,” a minor track from 1970's Let It Be“: “Elmore James got nothin' on

FOUNDERS KEEPERS: Can't Steal My Fire: The Songs of David Olney
Near the bottom of my stack of indifferently folded black t-shirts rests a relic from 2003, a wry marker from the career of the late Nashville singer-songwriter David Olney. “David Olney's World Tour of Nashville,” the back reads, listing six performances over six days. Those Music City shows,

FOUNDERS KEEPERS: 25 Years of Mary Gauthier's 'Drag Queens In Limousines'
Twenty-five years ago Mary Gauthier was a singing chef — a novelty from Baton Rouge, who was trying to find her voice and hold on to her sobriety in deepest Boston — gambling there might be an audience willing to listen to an album of hard-won songs titled Drag Queens In Limousines.

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Two Thompsons, Jon Langford, and Madeleine Peyroux
The curse of Linda Thompson is that she is known principally for the exquisite agony of 1982's Shoot Out the Lights, the divorce album she recorded and toured behind with soon-to-be-ex-husband, Richard. And for her voice, no small gift but rendered undependable by a condition called spasmodic dysphonia.

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Ann Savoy, Zoe Boekbinder, Jason Ringenberg, and More
Sometimes — this morning — one is given to suspect that we are little more than aggregations of the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, stories that haunt and inform and seek temporarily to connect or distance us.
Those are the best songs, in any event, the true stories, even