Twangville

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

Now & Then: Vincent Neil Emerson’s Blue Stars and the reach of Old No. 1

By

Some records announce themselves with a bang. Vincent Neil Emerson’s Blue Stars does something tougher. It settles in, tells the truth, and lets the weight of the songs do the heavy lifting. That makes it a natural fit beside Guy Clark’s Old No. 1, a record that helped define how Texas songwriting could be plain, precise, and quietly devastating. Beyond sound or geography, the connection is a shared belief that the smallest details often carry the biggest truths.

Now & Then: Fantastic Cat’s Cat Out of Hell and the reach of Stage Fright

By

Fantastic Cat’s Cat Out of Hell arrives with the band’s usual grin intact, but beneath the loose charm is a sturdier kind of record: one built on shared voices, accumulated mileage, and the small existential leaks that start showing up in adult life. That makes it a good candidate for a look backward, not to some obvious alt-country touchstone, but to The Band’s Stage Fright, another ensemble album where group chemistry sweetens songs about unease, pressure, and trying to keep your balance while the room keeps moving.

Now & Then: Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram and the reach of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

By

Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram arrives as the third and final entry in his Sagebrush Trilogy, a 20-song, 45-minute set built around the outlaw figure Billy McLane and cut again with Shooter Jennings in Los Angeles. The obvious move would be to compare it to some other modern revivalist country record, but Crockett is aiming farther back than that. This album is trying to turn country songs into a movie, or maybe into the memory of one, and that points straight to Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, the 1959 western cornerstone that helped teach later songwriters how to make myth feel personal.

Now & Then: Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart and the reach of Trace

By

Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart arrives like the sound of a songwriter stepping out of the dim room and into the bandstand without giving up the bruises that got him there. Released March 27, 2026, the record was cut live to tape in Nashville with his touring band and produced again by Sadler Vaden, which matters because these songs are still built on Farley’s plainspoken honesty, but they now hit with more lift, more room, and more faith in momentum. For the “Then,” Son Volt’s Trace from 1995 makes the most sense. Not because Farley sounds like Jay Farrar in some copycat way, but because Trace helped define how alt-country could carry working-class weariness, road-dusted poetics, and rock-band force in the same frame. 

Now & Then: Hurray For The Riff Raff’s Live Forever and the reach of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

By

Live Forever is a live album, but it also feels like a check-in from the road, a way of hearing Hurray For The Riff Raff’s songs in a shared space. Alynda Segarra has long written with one foot in folk tradition and the other in a tougher, more restless world, where memory, loss, survival, and movement blur together. That makes Car Wheels on a Gravel Road a useful earlier marker, not because the records sound alike in every respect, but because Lucinda Williams showed how roots music could carry intimate detail, regional texture, and emotional wear without losing its bite.