Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
always room for another highway poet, July 23, 2000
From the ashes of Uncle Tupelo we've been blessed with Son Volt! This is one of the best Americana albums I've ever heard. I always preferred the Jay Farrar-penned Uncle Tupelo songs, so Trace is a slice of alt/country heaven. Trace is also easily the best of the three Son Volt releases. My favorite song here is the melancholy Tear-Stained Eye...beautiful! Steve Earle fans might recognize the opening track, Windfall. He was covering it every night on the El Corazon tour. Fararrar wrote every song on Trace except for Mystifies Me, which was written by Ron Wood(Rolling Stones/Faces). There really isn't a weak song on Trace. It is a seamless trip through loud distortion, pedal steels, and heartache ballads. Jay Farrar is my generation's Neil Young...and this is the best thing he's been involved with since Tupelo's No Depression. If you dig Green On Red, Neil Young, the spirit of Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle or intelligent, emotional masterpieces in general...then you need look no further. Trace is a twilight ride in cool weather with the windows down. It's the musical equivalent of I-10.
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41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
(no title), December 19, 2002
This album was quite a bit Left-field for me when I got it. I dug Johnny Cash a little bit, and some of the old school country dudes, but I was essentially an indie rock/ avante garde jazz kinda guy. But Trace rocked me. I would listen to it on rainy days commuting to school in my car, because it just felt so right. It became very private music for me, as I didn't want my friends knowing I was into something so "country". But I eventually began to see how this music was far more honestly populist than Rage Against the Machine or REM or Ben Harper or whatever else most college kids were digging. Son Volt just didn't really put on airs about being real; they were real. So eventually I got into Uncle Tupelo and Wilco as well as Jay's solo work, but this is the best of the bunch by my reckoning. Great songs, great singing, just really artistically sound. And excellent for rainy day driving. Actually it's raining right now. Bye!
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lost Moment of Promise, November 18, 2003
1994. Radio was suddenly, briefly, free of sound-alikes. Pearl Jam and Blues Traveler and Son Volt were played side by side. Any band might emerge as the Next Big Thing.
Jay Farrar had written one of the most brilliant rock singles of the decade, "Drown," and it was everywhere, utterly out of place and perfectly beautiful amidst the grunge sludge and the epic jam band singles of the moment. A three-minute promise. A raw blend of country, punk, and existential loneliness: "Living right is easy; What goes wrong, you're causing it."
On the plains, a hundred thousand young men filled with sunny-day angst, a sorrow neither parallel nor at odds with Seattle's rain-induced joylessness, heard for the first time their voice, their cry, their raging against the shrinking of the world and its possibilities.
Here was something different from John Mellencamp, a sound come off the prairie that spoke for those of a new generation whose entire existence had in the previous decade been reduced by record executives and money-minded producers to a strummed acoustic guitar and some jaunty fiddle solos spooled onto tape and then off again over the FM airwaves.
This was a deeper song resounding over the wide, flat middle of the country. A promise that simultaneously summarized all that had come before - Johhny Cash, Chuck Berry, Gram Parsons, Jason and the Scorchers, the Clash, the Replacements, and even Nirvana - and at the same time looked toward a horizon falling ever away. Possibility. Truth on the radio. Places unnoticed, unspoken of, perhaps even unseen. Stories untold. Lives a person might recognize.
It's hard to imagine that moment if you were not there. If you came of age a year or a decade too late, if you have only known the homogenized sound of the late 1990s and early 21st century. To hear this record now and to know it was once a viable commerical venture is to mourn what has been lost. A moment of promise.
Jay Farrar is still making records, but they aren't on the radio. The prospect that your local deejay (if such a thing still exists) will spin one is laughable. Radio crept away from risk, from honesty, from what could have been. John Mellencamp remains, to many, the only voice of the heartland in American rock and roll.
Switch over to the AM. Perhaps you'll find a truer sound.
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Jay Farrar shares his favorite music with Amazon customers. See all artists' picks on our Music You Should Hear page.
by Son Volt 
