Drive-By Truckers - Pizza Deliverance
Alabama-reared Patterson Hood and the rest of Drive By Truckers are Southerners, and I'm a Northerner, so the connection I feel to the best songs on the band's sophomore release, Pizza Deliverance, is not geographical. It's more of a small-town America thing:
Gram Parsons - Under Your Spell Again
The brevity of Gram Parsons' life inherently magnifies the importance of any documents that can inform our understanding of his talent. Though the official Parsons canon contains more than enough to justify his stature, it's a meager catalogue compared to other legends who stuck around this mortal
Ernest Tubb & The Texas Troubadours - Waltz Across Texas
Ernest Tubb often attributed his extraordinary success to his less-than-ordinary voice, to the way any listener might hear one of his songs and conclude: "I can sing better than that guy." But you know what? We can't.
Granted, Tubb couldn't hit a
Richard Buckner - Bloomed
Richard Buckner's 1994 debut album, Bloomed, heralded the arrival of a uniquely expressive and honest songwriter and reaped Buckner tomes of critical praise, a deal with MCA (now void), and heavyweight expectations -- some of which he's delivered on, some of which he hasn't.
For
Koerner, Ray & Glover - (Lots More) Blues, Rags And Hollers
A trio of Minnesotans steeped in the country blues tradition, Koerner, Ray & Glover emerged as one of the best and most popular groups on the burgeoning '60s blues-folk revival scene. "Spider" John Koerner, Dave "Snaker" Ray and Tony "Little Sun" Glover
Mekons - I Have Been To Heaven And Back: Hen's Teeth And Other Lost Fragments Of Unpopular Culture, Vol. 1
Fifteen-odd years into the digital age, and I still don't know what to call these damn things -- odds and sods, scrap piles, dung heaps. But no matter what you call them, these collections of outtakes, soundtrack contributions, EP cuts and other artistic detritus are as ubiquitous to