“Only Dogs Have Their Day”: Son Volt’s ‘Trace’ at 30 » PopMatters

Thirty years later, we can finally hear the songs that Son Volt’s Jay Farrar wrote without the alt-country baggage critics perpetuated to the point of cliché.

Trace Son Volt Warner Bros. 19 September 1995

The careers of Son Volt and Wilco were once so intertwined that it became briefly clichéd to mention one in a discussion of the other. The 30th anniversary of Son Volt‘s Trace serves as a poignant reminder of the impermanence of such narratives, but it is worth remembering why these two very different bands were once regularly discussed as a matched pair.

For those who do not recall, Jay Farrar of Son Volt and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco previously shared songwriting duties in Uncle Tupelo, a Midwestern band that blended country and punk, and was just as content to cover Gram Parsons as the Stooges. Uncle Tupelo enjoyed modest success, but after they broke up, their legend became part of the early mythmaking of the alternative country movement. Even before their respective debuts hit the airwaves, Son Volt and Wilco were already two of the genre’s most identifiable acts.

Those debuts approached a still nascent alt-country genre from significantly different directions. Wilco’s A.M. is often lighthearted and fun, wearing its influences boldly on its sleeve. Trace, on the other hand, exudes an august gravity that situates the album there amongst those same influences. A.M. had its admirers, but Trace was the album the genre—still searching for respectability and its own place within the larger canon—so dearly needed.

No Depression featured Son Volt, not Wilco, on its cover in its first issue and ran a lengthy feature on Trace. Rolling Stone named the album in their critics’ top ten list, and The Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop poll placed Trace at 13 while A.M. came in behind another alt-country act, the Geraldine Fibbers, at a distant 34.

The following year, Wilco released an ambitious double album, Being There, whereas Son Volt doubled down on what had worked before. Warner Bros. marketed Straightaways as a companion piece, the result of spending a year on the road in support of Trace. In the politics of contrast that rule most new album reviews, Straightaways came up short, both in comparison to Being There and to Trace.

The unsentimental constancy that made Trace feel like a historical document came off as predictable and dull the second time around. As Grant Alden put it in a review for No Depression: “Accustomed now to the sound and sensibility of Farrar’s voice, Straightaways is less striking than its predecessor. The shock is gone, the rawness now familiar.”

Notice the grounds upon which Alden critiques Straightaways—its familiarity. There was a time when “kill two birds with one stone” conjured a novel, albeit gruesome, visual image. It was the initial vibrancy of that image that led to its use and subsequent overuse until we eventually stopped noticing the inherent violence and instead simply heard it as a placeholder for a single action that resulted in two outcomes. Consider, however, the recently coined “feed two birds with one biscuit”.

At this moment, perhaps you are picturing an outstretched hand and two wary birds weighing their hunger against their fear. One bird darts forward for a tentative bite, and the other follows suit. Both idioms convey the same notion, but only the unfamiliar one invites you to engage with it. Straightaways didn’t disappoint listeners because the songs were that much worse than the ones on Trace. It was disappointing because the songs too closely hewed to the sound Trace had begun for its listeners to engage with them fully.

By the time Son Volt released Wide Swing Tremolo, their third and final record with the original lineup, Farrar and company were stretching themselves a bit, particularly in terms of instrumentation and emotional distance. They were also still mining the same material featured on Trace (see “Hanging Blue Side”). Wilco, to much acclaim, had all but abandoned alternative country with Summerteeth, their third reinvention in three tries. They weren’t alone in this either. Other early darlings of the genre, such as the Old 97’s had similarly foreseen the approach of the alt-country horizon line and were redefining themselves in broader pop terms.

It should come as no surprise that the term “alt-country” could not long accommodate all of the artists it championed. It was never a genre of music but a class of several that, according to scholars Steve S. Lee and Richard Peterson, was “not based in an aesthetic of music production but in an aesthetic shared by consumers”.

Emerging from a listserv named after Uncle Tupelo’s mailing list, alt-country solidified around the socially constructed markers for authenticity that its fans discussed online. All of this was then consolidated and affirmed by the so-called “bible of alternative country”, No Depression magazine, whose editors shaped alt-country into a lifestyle brand that they would go on to manage and enforce.

Part of that initial branding involved presenting alt-country in ahistorical terms, as if a blending of country and anti-establishment attitudes hadn’t been done many times before. In reality, the term “alt-country” was more like the phrase “feed two birds with one biscuit”, a clever repackaging of an idea so familiar we failed to see it anymore.

While some pointed to Uncle Tupelo as year zero for the new genre, Mike Heidorn, drummer for Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, disagreed: “People are wrong in starting with [Uncle Tupelo] and saying we started anything because we were just picking up the ball, starting with Woody Guthrie and on to the early 1960s and the Flying Burrito Brothers that we were influenced by. We didn’t start a genre. We contributed to a long line of fairly good music.”

This is how Trace deserves to be remembered today: as an excellent contribution to a much larger tradition of music. It’s only now, 30 years after No Depression first hung the “best songwriter of his generation” tag on Farrar, that we can finally hear the songs he wrote without the alt-country baggage critics perpetuated to the point of cliché.

Part of it is that there is no expanded anniversary edition to peddle with nostalgic claims of cultural significance. Part of it is that poptimism has since challenged and refigured alt-country’s preoccupation with authenticity and other rockist binaries that initially defined the genre in opposition to Nashville and its star-making machine. Perhaps the most significant part of all is simply the defamiliarizing effects of time.

Time can revitalize even the most intractable of clichés. Jonathan Swift, the Irish satirist remembered for “A Modest Proposal”, also wrote a piece called “Polite Conversation”, in which he mocks the high lords and ladies of the 18th century for their anemic, mindless conversation. The dialogues are long strings of retorts stuffed full of clichés like “if one drinks in one’s porridge, one will cough in one’s grave”, “not till the ducks have eat up the dirt”, and, my favorite, “she wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork”.

While some of the clichés that Swift lampoons (“a penny for your thoughts”, “every dog has his day”) remain familiar nearly three hundred years later, others sound newly evocative to modern ears, if not a little bit puzzling due to our own collective forgetting. As with porridge and pitchforks, the passage of time has diminished the term “alt-country” in the broader public discourse, and with it, the genre’s first classic. Remarkably, Trace sounds all the better for it.

It’s a fitting epilogue for an album that deliberately sidesteps cliché. In “Catching On”, Farrar sings “only dogs have their day”, and in “Drown”, his mornings “have turned to days of swim or sink”. As with the record’s larger themes, he is making the familiar new again. In this case, it’s one of music’s biggest clichés of all—the album of longing set to the open road.

Farrar wrote much of Trace during the long drives between Louisiana and Illinois to visit his then-girlfriend. Unlike most traveling songs, however, the scenery outside his windshield does more than reflect his own emotions. The sprawling push and pull of rural, urban, and rural again is practically a character itself, chattering away next to Farrar on the passenger seat.

The resulting songs are a celebration of the timelessness of nature amidst the impermanence of man, offering a stubborn stoicism in the face of disappointment and a stillness within near-constant motion. A steady walking gait propels “Tear-Stained Eye”, while a lonely stretch of late-night highway, the windows rolled down and the radio turned up, brings comfort in “Windfall.”

You can sense the approach of a small town in “Ten Second News” and the full-throttle restlessness of “Loose String” as Farrar runs the single stoplight and heads back onto the highway. During the drive, “the traveling hands of time” loom over it all, deepening the urgency and mystery of every chorus. It’s an exhilarating first day of a road trip, even as day two (Straightaways) and three (Wide Swing Tremolo) wore listeners down.

Throughout Trace, it’s the awareness of our own limited time that imposes a patience and steadiness inured to the excessive highs and lows of everyday existence. As Farrar puts it most pointedly, “You’re with me now / Will be again / Other points in between.” Standing in the presence of the original, it is easy to align yourself with Farrar, though not at Wilco’s expense this time.

Of all the lyrics Farrar has sung, that line from the chorus of Son Volt’s biggest commercial hit, “Drown,” may be his most ubiquitous. Although it’s the one song on the album that, even 30 years later, hasn’t been able to make new again, it offers the best way to describe the Trace of today, a potential new cliché for the deserved second life of a classic album. It’s a second life that will eventually run its course, but as Farrar himself once said, “for now, it sounds like heaven”.