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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the early nineteen-nineties, Jeff Tweedy's voice was a fixture on the soundtrack I carried around in my head. Uncle Tupelo, the band Tweedy had started with his friend Jay Farrar, was something genuinely new, blending the rhythms and storytelling of traditional country with the mood and volume of punk, and evoking an imaginary America where the Carter Family, D. Boon, and J Mascis sat around a room making music together. The band's sound seemed so distinctive, in fact, that it sparked a musical movement called alt.country, whose fans fetishized steel guitars and acoustic songs about hard living and hard drinking. But I didn't really care about the banjos and Dobros. Mostly, I liked the way Tweedy's voice sounded--tense, raspy, simultaneously knowing and innocent, as if he expected nothing and everything from the world. His songs frayed at the edges instead of wrapping themselves up into neat packages. They were never corny, but they somehow radiated bleak optimism. They reminded me of that line from the Minutemen: "I live sweat, but I dream light-years."
Not everyone felt this way. At the time, the consensus was that Tweedy, though talented, was the lesser of the band's two songwriters, a poppier understudy to...
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