Anodyne at 30: Uncle Tupelo’s Long Cut to the Heart of Alt-Country

In the summer of 1992, Belleville, Illinois alt-country trio Uncle Tupelo—headed by songwriting maestros Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy—released their third studio album, the anonymously titled March 16–20, 1992. Like so many albums of the time, this was a direct response to the overwhelming explosion of Nirvana’s Nevermind, which was released a year prior. With all manner of stuffed-shirts, trend-chasers and money-grubbers begging and pleading them to cash in on the alt-rock wave—to turn up the feedback, growl and perform as disaffected as possible—Uncle Tupelo had one clear and response: “Fuck you.” This “fuck you” took the form of a jangly, acoustic, bluegrass-inspired collection of original and traditional folk songs with an impenetrable title that spit in the face of conventional alt-rock wisdom. Uncle Tupelo was carving their own path in the most traditional sense, singing about the evils of capitalist coal companies while sticking their middle fingers up at the corruption of record companies. A little over a year later, Uncle Tupelo crystallized their rebellious spirit with Anodyne, an inspired, influential and, at times, acrimonious marriage of country, punk and alt-rock.

For reasons we’ll get into later, Anodyne is very much the beginning of the end for Uncle Tupelo—but, at the time, it seemed more like the beginning of a new beginning. After a fallout with Rockville Records over royalty payments—or lack thereof—the band moved to Sire records, who had recently released albums from Dinosaur Jr and The Replacements, in a deal that promised at least two Uncle Tupelo records. When it came to record, the band headed down to Austin, Texas’s Cedar Creek Studio to work with Brian Paulson—the engineer and producer whose recent success on Slint’s Spiderland and homey, ramshackle studio impressed Farrar, Tweedy and company. The two-week session centered on one-take recordings and resulted in the ideal middle ground between their early records.

1990’s No Depression, an album that would go on to define an entire genre and publication, is very much the work of angry young men with a bone to pick—equal parts breakneck punk and outlaw country, the earliest signs of what some have recently termed “bootgaze.” March 16-20, 1992, on the other hand, is steeped in tradition, almost exclusively acoustic and features a healthy dose of fiddles, lap steels and banjo. From the first moments of Anodyne, it’s obvious Uncle Tupelo are not reinventing themselves so much as they were polishing the foundations already in place. The fiddle is an inherently cinematic instrument and “Slate” implements this to near perfection, sweeping up the pathos of dusty barroom floors and dilapidated factory towns and serving as the ideal prelude to Farrar’s bourbon-soaked poetry. “Loneliness drinks the bitters til the cold winds warm again”; Farrar alway sounded like a middle-aged drifter at the far-end of his rope, but it’s here where Uncle Tupelo found the perfect canvas for that smokey palette. And yet, it’s only a few songs later, on the Tweedy-penned “The Long Cut,” that they abandon all remnants of old-timey traditionalism in favor of high-voltage feedback—blowing the roof off the old farmhouse, so to speak.

To boil these two songs down to the differing viewpoints of their respective writers may be a bit reductive, but I think we’ve waited long enough to address one of the defining characteristics of Anodyne. At this point in their creative partnership, Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy did not like each other. I’m not sure whether they like each other now either, but Anodyne was surely the highpoint of their animosity. Like many disintegrating relationships, it’s near impossible to find its source—and it’s ill-advised to try to diagnose such a complicated connection from the outside. A likely reductive historical record indicates that Farrar found Tweedy’s enthusiasm, pop-sensibilities and drinking a little tiresome, while Tweedy found Farrar’s inability to properly express his frustrations maddening in its own right. To say they were ever best friends and seamless collaborators would be misleading but, by 1993, they were working as almost two separate artists under the same banner. This could not have been very fun for the band, but from an outsider’s perspective, it’s hard to argue with the results.

Anodyne, more than any other Uncle Tupelo record, is one of two halves, each displaying the songwriting mastery that would come to define Farrar and Tweedy for years to come. Though the lines would blur as their careers progressed, Farrar is the far more poetic of the two throughout Anodyne, his songs defined by a narrative murkiness—more opaque and moody than precise. “No sign of reconciliation, it’s a quarter past the end. Full moon from on high, across the board, we lose again,” Farrar sings on the album’s title track, perhaps in reference to Tweedy but also in keeping with the visions of pain and loss he sings about throughout his own body of work. Even when the decibels rise, as on “Chickamauga,” Farrar has a keen sense of when to drop the emotional anvil; “Solitude is where I’m bound, I don’t ever want to taste these tears again.” Anodyne finds Tweedy in a much more didactic mode, ranting against industry bullshit on “We’ve Been Had” and paying homage to country music’s history on “Acuff-Rose.” This works most effectively on “New Madrid,” perhaps the crowning achievement of the record as a whole, in which Tweedy uses the story of Iben Browning and his prediction of an apocalyptic earthquake that was to occur in Missouri in 1990 as a backdrop for the kind of yearning that defines the song’s alt-country backdrop.

Much has been made of Uncle Tupelo’s first record No Depression and the importance it had in establishing alt-country as a genre that would quietly chug along over the next few decades, but Anodyne, to my mind, is much more indicative of the influence the band would have. For one, this record is, by its very nature, the blueprint for two essential bands to follow: Farrar’s Son Volt and Tweedy’s Wilco. Technically, Son Volt and Wilco both released their first album in 1995, but in many ways, Anodyne is a split EP spiritually—where each songwriter got to work out the kinks for their true debuts. So much of Wilco’s A.M. can be heard in Tweedy’s songs for Uncle Tupelo, and the only thing keeping Anodyne. Both Wilco and Son Volt have released 24 albums collectively since Uncle Tupelo’s dissolution, and both Farrar and Tweedy have grown immensely as songwriters, but a good chunk of what would make them great is right there in Anodyne.

It’s a bit of cosmic kismet, too, that 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of Anodyne. Alt-country has been a genre of ebbs and flows over the last three decades, but you could argue that this year may end up being the highest point for alt-country yet this millennium. Two of the most celebrated records of the year—both on this site and elsewhere—have been Wednesday’s Rat Saw God and Ratboys’ The Window, records that are undoubtedly indebted to the blend of indie-rock, country and punk that congealed so seamlessly on Anodyne. For Wednesday, the country influences may hide behind raging walls of noise and blistering guitar solos, but singer Karly Hartzman certainly shares Farrar’s penchant for small-town poeticism. Whereas Ratboys’ Julia Steiner, with her innate pop sensibilities and midwest charm, is a direct descendant of Tweedy’s work on Anodyne and beyond. Uncle Tupelo may have been a marriage of convenience, one that quickly ran its course, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a band with such a spare catalog so influential this side of Television. Anodyne was the dying embers of Uncle Tupelo, but it sparked a flame that still burns 30 years later.