Son Volt’s 1995 debut, Trace, is an album full of highways and backroads, maps and legends. Sturdily constructed from scraps of rusted country and strange, white-line-feverish imagery, these songs conjure long nights behind the wheel, your only company whichever radio station happens to come through clearly. “Switching it over to AM, searching for a truer sound,” Jay Farrar sings on opener “Windfall,” as the fiddle and pedal steel two-step around him. “Can’t recall the call letters, steel guitar and settle down.”
It’s ideal road-trip music, even if Farrar sounds like he’s driving to outrun his troubles. Barely a year before the album’s release, Farrar had been in another band, Uncle Tupelo, who were maybe not the founders of the ’90s alt-country movement,…
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…but were certainly its chief fomenters. Hailing from the dying industrial town of Belleville, Illinois, they found inspiration in the Carter Family and the Minutemen alike, writing folk tunes but playing them with punk ferocity. After four influential albums together — including 1993’s Anodyne, both their major label debut and their swan song — the group acrimoniously parted ways, with members Farrar and Jeff Tweedy trading words and punches onstage and off.
Son Volt emerged from the debris with a heavier sound grounded in crunchy classic-rock riffs and Farrar’s impressionistic lyrics, and the band even notched a minor hit with their first single, “Drown.” Two decades later, Trace is getting the deluxe reissue treatment, which includes two remasters (one for CD, the other for vinyl), a handful of early demos, and a second disc featuring a live set from a 1996 show at the Bottom Line in New York City.
Trace remains an album rooted in the past. Especially during the ’90s heyday of alt-rock and Clear Channel, the very idea of AM radio was almost quaint, as though Farrar’s dial was picking up broadcasts from some dark corner of history. But his subject isn’t merely old classic rock and country tunes, but more generally those fleeting moments that we barely think to savor before they’re gone forever. These songs try to freeze those moments just as they take in these sweeping American vistas through the windshield.
Farrar isn’t one for such grand statements, unless of course it’s in a song. Over the decades he has developed a reputation as a tough interview, generally taciturn and unforthcoming, but when I spoke to him recently, he seemed eager to revisit this era in his life and career. “I had moved down to New Orleans,” he explains, “and I was driving up to St. Louis and Minneapolis regularly. It was a liberating time for me both personally and creatively. I was living in a new city, doing a lot of traveling, taking a lot of time to reflect. A lot of lyrical ideas were coming to the surface while I was driving, and sometimes I could construct melodies and putting stuff together in the car. It was fertile in that respect.”
Disc 1
1. Windfall
2. Live Free
3. Tear Stained Eye
4. Route
5. Ten Second News
6. Drown
7. Loose String
8. Out of the Picture
9. Catching On
10. Too Early
11. Mystifies Me
12. Route (acoustic demo)
13. Drown (demo)
14. Out of the Picture (demo)
15. Loose String (demo)
16. Live Free (demo)
17. Too Early (demo)
18. Catching On (demo)
19. Windfall (demo)
Disc 2: Live from Bottom Line 2/12/96:
1. Route
2. Loose String
3. Catching On
4. Live Free
5. Anodyne
6. Windfall
7. Slate
8. Out of the Picture
9. Tear Stained Eye
10. True to Life
11. Cemetery Savior
12. Ten Second News
13. Fifteen Keys
14. Drown
15. Looking for a Way Out
16. Chickamauga
17. Too Early
18. Looking at the World Through a Windshield (Del Reeves cover)