Remastered and Expanded Son Volt Debut Sounds as Timely as Ever

The question is dusty but no less significant: How do you follow up a masterpiece? More specifically, when you’re a rock band whose debut is the sort of tour de force that most recording artists can only hope to make three or four albums into their discography, how do you deal with the impossibly high standard you have already set for yourself?

Rightly hailed as a classic twenty years after its initial release, Son Volt’s Trace has proven to be a very tough act to follow. There’s no question that frontman and lyricist Jay Farrar has made beautiful and enduring music in the intervening years, both as a solo artist and band leader, but most fans would agree that no subsequent collection of Farrar songs has quite matched the artistry and urgency of that first Son Volt album.

To be fair, as co-founder of Uncle Tupelo (1987-1994), Farrar had several years and four albums to hone his craft, which is probably why Trace has never really sounded like a true debut. Moreover, he and drummer Mike Heidorn had already played together for years, first in the Primatives (sic) and later in Tupelo, establishing a musical dynamic that would serve as the backbone of this original and best Son Volt lineup. So if Trace sounds like the seasoned culmination of experience and sharpened talent, it’s because it is. And if the respectable Son Volt albums that immediately followed it—1997’s Straightaways and 1998’s Wide Swing Tremolo—failed to top it, that may just be because it’s untoppable.

Listening to the remastered 20^th-anniversary edition of Trace, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could have exceeded the gorgeously played road song “Windfall,” or the brawny full-on grunge of “Drown,” the album’s single. As a lyricist, Farrar’s command of language and sensory imagery is on full display here, as when he sings, “Southbound, you can taste the weather/It feels like home.” What erstwhile partner Jeff Tweedy once called Farrar’s “sonorous gift of a voice” is perfectly suited to the embattled-outskirt vignettes woven throughout these songs. He sounds like a man with one foot on either side of the rural-urban/past-future divide, clear-eyed yet ambivalent about his country’s troubled history, and leery of what he sees coming down the road. “Take away this Columbus day,” he sings on “Out of the Picture,” “no more bones on display.” And then there’s “Route,” where “the rural route sleeps while the city bleeds all over itself” and “the cleanup won’t work while the fallout goes on.”

With the smoldering ruins of Uncle Tupelo in Farrar’s rearview, the tensions on Trace seem less internal than observational. Freed of the dysfunctional unit that was his former band, Farrar writes from a place of greater perspective, with an eye toward the big picture. “You don’t see me,” he sings, a line that could be read as his farewell to Tweedy and the band that had become Wilco. “I’m catching on to you.”

And despite all that’s happened to music and the larger world in the past two decades, Trace holds up. If anything, its country-punk stylings seem fresher and more subversive now than they did in 1995. Even the seemingly boozy cover of Ron Wood’s “Mystifies Me” manages to transcend its own time. Front to back, the album owns no weak tracks or disposable moments.

Fans reluctant to shell out for another remastered edition of an album they already have needn’t worry about the expanded Trace. The live, previously unissued Bottom Line recording that comprises Disc 2 is well worth the price of admission. Along with Son Volt versions of half a dozen Uncle Tupelo songs, you get to hear most of Trace played live, including a slightly different reading of “Tear Stained Eye” that may be even better than the studio version, which I had thought was perfect.

As for those neophytes whose idea of alternative country is Ryan Adams remaking a Taylor Swift album, Trace might just be the truer sound that sets you straight.