In the UK, Brown Horse and Vegas Water Taxi have the weeping pedal steel, in the former case tied to something very heartland and in the latter paired with a very English indie sensibility. Westside Cowboy and Little Grandad both borrow from the spiky rootsiness of early Wilco, while Wyatt play slacker country rock. Over in the US, where there’s always going to be more of this sort of thing, you can point to the current indie-rock holy trinity of Waxahatchee, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, plus Florry, Ratboys, Thomas Dollbaum, Fust, SG Goodman, Lily Seabird, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band and more.
It’s been a long time coming – it’s so exciting to me when bands take really simple ingredients and find ways to make really progressive recipes with them. What’s exciting to me about alt-country is that the same cowboy chords are in play here, but the filter they come through is more freaky, more balls to the wall. It’s fun to see how many places people can take these essential ideas.” London quartet Little Grandad, who earlier this summer signed a three-album deal with Communion, didn’t even know about alt-country when they started playing last year.
I’ve listened to a lot of music in the last year.” One of those discoveries was Jason Molina, of Songs: Ohia and the Magnolia Electric Co, who died in 2013 of organ failure following long-term alcohol abuse. I believe his songwriting. I watched an interview of him, and he’s saying how he’s so confused that he makes this music because he listens to Metallica and metal bands, and he’s like, ‘How has it turned out like this?’ That makes me feel better about what we make, because you stumble into it.” By chance, in the week all these interviews were conducted, London became alt-country central.
On the Tuesday night, the Norfolk band Brown Horse were the house band at a night honouring the songs of Molina, with a rotating cast of singers including Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and Lottie Pendlebury of Goat Girl. On Wednesday, Wilco were in town, with alt-country band Hovvdy opening and a set that didn’t eschew the country end of their catalogue, and on Thursday and Friday Greg Freeman, from Vermont, played two sold-out club shows. Everyone seems to have taken different routes to get to similar places, though all these musicians in their 20s or early 30s came to it via their own discovery, rather than hearing it in the cars of gen X parents.
Steiner grew up with country in the air in Kentucky, and added the alternative rock later. Medosch hails Lucinda Williams as the source of all things alt-country (a complete music head, she offers an eloquent disquisition on why powerpop, and Big Star in particular, must be considered part of this lineage). Thomas Dollbaum, who lives in New Orleans, remembers hearing the music you can’t avoid, such as Bob Dylan, then having uncles send him John Prine CDs, “because they knew I was interested in that kind of music.
And then I found stuff on my own. I listened to a lot of Jason Molina, a lot of Damian Jurado, a lot of Bill Callahan and Richard Buckner growing up. In early college I had a friend and we’d send tapes back and forth.” Brown Horse came to alt-country via a eureka moment.
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