We’ve Been Had: Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne at 30

When Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne came out 30 years ago, it was a definitive end, but it was simply the end of the beginning.

The band’s 1990 debut album No Depression became a cornerstone of the burgeoning alt-country movement. Led by songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, the act fine-tuned its sound over the next few years, gaining a wider audience and making the jump to a major label. They released Anodyne, but instead of launching a new era, the album closed this one. Just a few months later Jay Farrar announced that he’d be leaving the band and the first phase of the alt-country movement wrapped up, but only so that a new round could begin.

The band’s sound always relied on a mixture of country and punk, specifically the DIY midwestern sort (if the Minutemen influence wasn’t apparent, their song “D. Boon” made it explicit). No Depression certainly had both of these elements and deserves its classic status. It wouldn’t be the band’s pinnacle, though, as they continued building on that start, first exploring further country sounds before figuring out how to seamlessly blend all their influences under their remarkable songwriting, all just in time for the band to break up, of course.

Anodyne opens memorably. Farrar’s “Slate” uses slightly oblique lyrics to grapple with both the band’s move to major label Sire Records and his own failing partnership with Tweedy. The fiddle sets the album in country territory, but it sounds like none of its influences. Farrar sings with just enough emotion, and when Tweedy joins in, the pairing sounds wonderful, a bittersweet irony listening back. Tweedy’s “Acuff-Rose” briefly offers the acoustic guitar sound that would fit on Wilco’s A.M. before the fiddle returns to hint at a hoedown; the track ends up being neither a Wilco midtempo number nor a barn dance cut. Tweedy pays tribute in the lyrics to the classic country tradition, but there’s a hint of worry surrounding all of it, in part since he only “sometimes” can feel like “everything’s alright.”

Tweedy then twists his own sound around for “The Long Cut,” bringing the band back into rock territory but not letting his punk roots show. Farrar sounds great on guitar here, a reminder that – whatever interpersonal issues were going on – the combination of artists was nearly perfect for a few years. The album shifts away again from rock and from Farrar and Tweedy for “Give Back the Key to My Heart,” an old Doug Sahm number on which Sahm himself appears. The track epitomizes the Uncle Tupelo moment. The band looks back (in this case only to 1976) to draw on an established tradition, but only to move it in new directions. Sahm was explicitly combining rock and country in the mid-70s, but Farrar and Tweedy found ways to run with that history in new ways. Having Sahm appear honors their predecessors without sounding beholden to them.

The future looked a little opaque at the time. Farrar’s “Chickamauga” remains one of his best songs. Uncle Tupelo lets loose on it, all their influences gathered together for Farrar to say he’s leaving. The song draws on history and geography to express the feelings of leaving a demanding relationship (in this case, as we’d fine out, Farrar and Tweedy’s). When he describes it as “our chronic impending disaster,” he nails an entire state of being in just four words. The track, like the album, avoids becoming too personally to be effective. Stripped of its extra-album context, the song still works brilliantly, a summation of the end of something.

Looking back, the split feels simultaneously inevitable and unnecessary. The artists were blending well. As on “The Long Cut,” the pairing of Tweedy and Farrar works perfectly on “New Madrid.” With each writer singing lead on his own songs, the album could have felt like a split record, but the band holds together as a singular entity, much to the credit of the other musicians building this sound, especially Ken Coomer on drums, John Stirratt on bass and guitar and Max Johnston on most of the instruments that makes it sound country. The main artists’ divergence comes through if you pick apart the tracks. Tweedy sounds happier and Farrar remains in a place where there is depression. That tension, musically, gives the album a richness that makes the moments of hope believable and the moments of despair sympathetic. 

Farrar closes the album with “Steal the Crumbs,” singing “No more will I see you” as the album ends. Nothing could be more direct, and the sadness of the song (applied biographically or not) resonates three decades later. After this release, the band would go their separate ways, Farrar to Son Volt and Tweedy, Coomer, Stirrat, and Johnston to Wilco. Each band would achieve prominence in their own ways, continuing to explore new twists on tradition without settling. Anodyne manages to sound like both bands at the same time, but also like neither of them. Uncle Tupelo reached its pinnacle just before it all came apart.

While new music would begin out of that ending, the album itself wasn’t simply a piece of historical significance; it was a landmark pointing to itself.

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Justin Cober-Lake

Justin Cober-Lake, based in central Virginia, has worked in publishing for the past 15 years. His editing and freelance writing has focused mostly on cultural criticism, particularly pop music. You can follow him on Twitter @jcoberlake.

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