The CD that launched a thousand record collections

In May 1996, I saw in a newsagents the first issue of a new magazine about movies and music called Uncut, which I bought and liked. I have bought every issue since, and have come to trust its musical recommendations more than any other source. I cannot start to list all the bands it has introduced me to, particularly through its much-missed free CDs with collections of songs from new artists or albums (titled at various times 'Unconditionally Guaranteed' or 'The playlist'), now replaced most months by far less interesting themed compilations, some of which never even get their plastic wrapper removed.



However, of all its CDs, one stands out for eternity in my, and I bet many others', mind, and that is one which appeared in 1998 called 'Sounds of the New West', which sought to showcase the best of what has been called Alternative Country or Alt-Country. This was as far as it was possible to get from Dolly Parton and Garth Brooks and still share a planet, but still had at its sad bleeding heart some indefinable quality of Americana which meant that the only category it could somehow be shoehorned into had to have the word 'country' attached.

It wasn't my first introduction to this music; a few months previously, a rave Uncut Album of the Month review had sent me off to find and buy 'Strangers Almanac' by Whiskeytown, still probably getting my vote for one of the best albums of that whole movement (perhaps it was, for me, first love, the thrill of the new, guitars and harmonies and sadness and songs about wars and women in bars and houses on hills, but somehow filtered through an angry indie sadness not unknown to my favourite UK bands of the 1980s). I then sought out a few more which I liked from this strange new category, like Willard Grant Conspiracy's 'Flying Low', with Uncut beside me all the way, leading me gently by the hand through this unexplored musical hinterland.

So, I was sort of primed to welcome this CD when it came but, nonetheless, it blew my bloody socks off. I listened and re-listened and thought and read, and listened some more, and then I want shopping and didn't stop for most of the next decade, exploring every scrap of the territory it had provided a treasure map of, excavating under every 'x' and exploring every nook, creek and cranny.

I was not alone; several contemporaries of mine, wistfully tending our 80s record collections and looking around in suspicion at mid-90s crap like britpop and most of what passed for pop music at the time, abruptly took to this stuff like flies to dung. It was the promised land and goldrush rolled into one when we could find no new musical sustinence elsewhere; we were thirsty for new music that sated our souls and it poured and poured.

The track-listing was as follows:

01 - Hazeldine - Tarmac
02 - The Flying Burrito Brothers - Sin City
03 - Josh Rouse - Suburban Sweetheart
04 - Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball
05 - Pernice Brothers - Crestfallen
06 - Neal Casal - Today I'm Gonna Bleed
07 - Kate Campbell - Crazy In Alabama
08 - Willard Grant Conspiracy - Evening Mass
09 - Wagon - Two Hours Alone
10 - Freakwater - Lorraine
11 - Vic Chesnutt - Until The Led
12 - Calexico - Trigger
13 - The Handsome Family - Weightless Again
14 - Lambchop - Saturday Option
15 - Silver Jews - How To Rent A Room
16 - Will Oldham - Apocalypse, No!
17 - 16 Horsepower - Coal Black Horses
18 - The Walkabouts - On The Beach
19 - Nadine - Dark Light
20 - Emmylou Harris - Boulder To Birmingham [live]

However, something changed, just like Pulp (the only bright spot in that 1990s UK wilderness) said it would. In 2008, my favourite music was by TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, Glasvegas and others who could not possibly be even vaguely associated with country, no matter how alternative. Most worryingly of all, in that year many of the artists on SONW (for short) released albums.

It appears we have grown apart, and are no longer as close as we once were. Its not them, its me. But I am nearly 40 now, and instinctively I feel the reverse should be happening, that I should be heading for what seems like more mature music, not going bloody backwards. Put bluntly, this is a musical existential crisis for me; I just don't understand where it all went wrong, how we drifted apart, how first love has turned to increasingly distant respect. This is not what I ever thought would happen, and I need to understand it. As conventional therapy is not cheap these days in recession-shrouded Ireland, I am afraid I am going to have to use this blog to work it out of my system.

Over the next weeks or months, and not in every post, I am going to do a track-by-track analysis of the SONW CD, in terms of what each song meant to me, which ones I followed up, and where they led me. I want to try and draw some closure on the whole damn thing, or at least use the experience as a way to maybe explore the growth, peak and possible decline of a movement which, for a while at least, meant a hell of a lot to many folks who never went next or near to the heartlands of America which begat the music and musicians alike. Its an experiment, and it may not work, but I want to try, and if anyone ever reads this I can only hope they find it useful, if only as a case study of an odd and outgrown obsession and its strange chronicler.