the best songs ever: the lost years

[gabrielle]

In 1992 Uncle Tupelo released their beautiful, largely acoustic album called March 16-20. 1992.

Another band that decided to zig when they were told to zag.  From wikipedia:  

Quote:In 1990, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck attended an Uncle Tupelo concert at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia. Buck was particularly impressed with the band's rendition of the Louvin Brothers' "Great Atomic Power", and contacted the band after the show. Uncle Tupelo singers Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy exchanged their interests in bluegrass music with Buck, and decided to collaborate on an acoustic music project in the future.[1]

Two years later, the alternative rock of bands such as Nirvana broke into the mainstream. Farrar was irate about the pressure from the music industry to sound like the trend:[2]

Quote:This should insulate us from that industry bullshit, people looking for the next Nirvana. I don't think anybody is the next Nirvana, certainly not us. People always talk about the next Beatles, the next Elvis. You can't predict that stuff.

Uncle Tupelo's frustrations with their record label Rockville Records grew when the label refused to pay the band's royalties for the sales of their first two albums. This resulted in a "nothing-to-lose context" for the recording of a third album. In what was a sharp contrast to the popular music styles at the time, Uncle Tupelo decided to record an album of folk songs.[3]

The album ended up outselling both of their previous albums combined.  It is my personal favorite.

This one was written and sung by Jay Farrar:





And this one by Jeff Tweedy:





A lovely instrumental:





And these two songs are covers of older songs, or of traditional folk tunes, so they don't really count as 3T songs entirely, but UT did an excellent job with them so here:





The instrumental part that starts about halfway through this track is very beautiful:





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_16%E2%80%9320,_1992