Twangville

A music blog featuring Alt-Country, Americana, Indie, Rock, Folk & Blues. Est. 2005.

Now & Then: John R. Miller’s The Great Unknowing and the reach of The Poet Game

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John R. Miller’s The Great Unknowing expands his country-rooted songwriting without leaving its working-class concerns behind. The album moves between acoustic character studies, honky-tonk arrangements, and louder electric passages, but Miller’s focus stays on people dealing with disappointment, economic pressure, and their own bad habits. Greg Brown’s 1994 album The Poet Game offers a useful earlier model. Brown also built songs from ordinary lives and local details, then allowed broader social concerns to emerge without turning the writing into commentary first and music second.

Now & Then: The Rolling Stones’ Foreign Tongues and the reach of Berry Is on Top

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The Rolling Stones have spent their career making their influences easy to hear, and Chuck Berry remains one of the clearest. Foreign Tongues connects through its guitar-driven arrangements, Jagger’s character-based singing, and the band’s preference for direct, rhythm-first rock and roll. Chuck Berry’s 1959 album Berry Is on Top offers a useful point of comparison because it contains several songs and techniques that helped shape the Stones from their earliest years.

Now & Then: Margo Price’s Days Of Unrest and the reach of Van Lear Rose

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Margo Price has never treated country music as neutral ground, and Days Of Unrest removes any remaining doubt. Released as a July 4 weekend protest mixtape, it puts her in conversation with the folk-protest tradition while keeping one boot in country music. The “Then” album is Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose, a 2004 record that made plainspoken country songwriting feel newly urgent. 

Now & Then: American Aquarium’s New Ways to Lose and the reach of Tennessee

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American Aquarium’s New Ways to Lose puts BJ Barham back in familiar territory, but with a wider lens. The songs still come from bars, back roads, family memory, and bad decisions, yet the focus has shifted from private wreckage to the social pressures around it. For a useful older reference point, Lucero’s Tennessee makes sense. Released in 2002, it helped define a Southern alt-country lane where punk urgency, country phrasing, and bar-band durability could sit in the same set without apology. 

Now & Then: Swamp Dogg’s Swamp Dogg Contemplates The Afterlife and the reach of Solomon Burke’s Don’t Give Up on Me

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Swamp Dogg’s Swamp Dogg Contemplates The Afterlife belongs in the long line of soul records where age sharpens the writing instead of softening it. The album looks at mortality, memory, belief, and unfinished business with the plain speech that has always made Swamp Dogg hard to categorize. A useful earlier reference is Solomon Burke’s 2002 album Don’t Give Up on Me, a late-career soul record that gave an older singer room to use experience as the central instrument.