Here is the track list for 26 Reformations of a Middle Class American Heart, Vol. 6: His N.D. World, which I completed in September 2022 during the opening weeks of school while on dorm duty.
Side A:
The Bottle Rockets, Indianapolis (3:32)
The Waco Brothers, Take Me to the Fires (3:32)
Freakwater, Scamp (2:48)
Whiskeytown, Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight (3:15)
Calexico, The Ride (3:09)
The Jayhawks, Big Star (4:24)
Uncle Tupelo, The Long Cut (3:20)
Alejandro Escovedo, Nickel & Spoon (5:22)
Mary Cutrufello, Tonight’s the Night (3:51)
Richard Buckner, Jewelbomb (3:10)
Blue Mountain, Bloody ‘98 (3:10)
Lambchop, Magnificent Obsession (3:20)
The Schramms, If I Were (3:07)
Side B:
Kevn Kinney, Down and Out Law (2:56)
Hazeldine, Dead Love (4:47)
Backsliders, Throwin’ Rocks at the Moon (3:50)
Old 97’s, Barrier Reef (3:50)
The Picketts, Good Good Wife (3:05)
Ween, I’m Holding You (4:03)
Golden Smog, If I Only Had a Car (4:04)
The Honey Dogs, Mainline (3:01)
Son Volt, Driving the View (2:58)
Wilco, Far, Far Away (3:20)
Emmylou Harris, Where Will I Be (4:16)
Buddy Miller, Love Grows Wild (2:35)
V-Roys, Hold On to Me (3:15)
I came around to alt.country slowly and have maintained a tenuous relationship with it during the roughly twenty years that I’ve been a sometime listener. For years, I would embrace it on the energy of a song or a band someone put on a mixtape for me, or a song I heard on the radio, dig in for awhile to the music around its fringes, and then grow frustrated by its limitations and back away, taking with me a few new songs I enjoyed singing and playing on guitar. Eventually I heard enough of the older country and roots singer-songwriters the music was responding to that I felt better taking only what I liked and skipping the rest. What’s left is an assortment of entry points and a mix guided by Mary Lou Lord’s rhymebook version of the No Depression music galaxy.
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It began with a column in The Stranger, a free weekly in Seattle that probably still exists but used to be crucial for following music in the city. In its pages, sometime in 2002, an author whose name I can’t recover described a mixtape given to her by a friend in the late 1990s that struck a middle ground between the indie rock of 80s-90s Athens, Georgia and the country and rock of 80s-90s Austin, Texas. Having heard little of that music, I did some research and discovered a pretty solid vein of good songwriting in both cities. Since the author hadn’t provided any kind of roadmap in her article as to what her friend’s mix might actually have contained, I imagined my own version of the space between those cities and made a mixtape of my own, which I called Stuck Outside of Austin With the Athens Blues Again. It was a two-hour tape and I made it for Dave Mohs, my good friend from high school. I’ll share it here someday. Several years later I made another version of that mixtape, shorter and more to the point, for Jay Thompson. Several years after that, I tried again with a mix called Summer’s Gone. I guess it’s coming up time to give it another try by now. The imaginative space designed by a mix I never got to hear has been especially fruitful for me in this genre.
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It began when I moved to Austin, Texas a year after that mixtape. I hadn’t ever dreamed I’d move to Austin, Texas. I just had an imaginary mixtape to make. But there I was in Austin, and just by being there I learned about a lot of artists who had defined alt.country, either during the 90s or twenty years earlier in a different heyday of music in Austin. I missed a show by The Flatlanders but caught a great one by Lucinda Williams. I never saw Junior Brown at the Continental Club but I did see Ryan Adams at the first Austin City Limits festival. I learned about Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark and Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, but not Mickey Newbury or The Blasters, not yet. I tried out, for the first time, liking country music. Another thing that, growing up, I never thought I’d do.
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It began a decade earlier, in the family EuroVan in 1995. With Ball & Chain by Social Distortion on a tape I listened to all summer, I got my first taste of the blend between punk rock and country that was known (though not to me) as cowpunk — The Waco Brothers are one of the defining bands in that genre. I loved that one song so much that I felt I didn’t need to listen to anything else like it — and for awhile, I didn’t.
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It began when Kate Preusser made me two mixtapes, summer and fall of 2003, that included all the alt.country she’d heard while attending college in Roanoke, VA in the late 1990s. It began in 2001 when Marc Brandi, my coworker at Newbury Comics in Boston, whose consummate taste I admired greatly, stopped what he was doing to listen to a new album by Ryan Adams called Gold, and yes my first thought was, you mean Bryan Adams? It began when I heard a song called Quite A Feelin’ on a radio show, 2015, while driving through Carkeek Park in Seattle. It began when my sister included Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show and Whiskey by Trampled By Turtles on a mixtape she made in Colorado in 2004 or 2005. It began in the late 1990s when I played guitar with my cousins the Wesleys and they played songs I only learned later were from the same milieu. It began when I accidentally downloaded this song by Mary Lou Lord, His N.D. World, while trying to download a file of His Indie World from Napster sometime in 2000 in my dorm room in Seattle.
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It began when…it began when…but it was always beginning, never getting anywhere real, nowhere further than mixtapes, since I don’t like the genre’s worldview enough to listen to entire albums. Even today.
Sunday Mixtape #15: His N.D. World