Trace by Son Volt

Trace, Son Volt's debut, came out on Warner Bros. on September 19, 1995, and it arrived with a scorecard attached. Jay Farrar had formed the band in 1994 after Uncle Tupelo split, and everybody wanted to know whether his new outfit or Wilco, the other Tupelo splinter, would make the better record.

Farrar answered in a low, weathered voice that sounds older than the man singing it. Trace moves between dusty country laments and full-throttle electric rock, all of it rooted in folk and Americana and haunted by the open highway. "Windfall" is the gentle one, rolling along like a long night drive, while "Drown" grinds harder and became an honest-to-goodness radio hit, the band's only single to crack Billboard's rock charts. The critics loved it, and by 2009 it had outsold Wilco's A.M. two copies to one.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.