The Jayhawks

For the band's major-label debut, veteran producer George Drakoulias adorned the rootsy songwriting of Gary Louris and Mark Olsen with Telecaster hooks and tight harmony, resulting in a genre-defining alt country record. Using Springsteen's Nebraska and Neil Young's Crazy Horse as source material, songs like "Waiting For the Sun" and "Sister Cry" shaped the Americana groundswell of the next decade. If the tales of windswept plains, scorned love and blue collar strife sound a bit staid today, don't blame the Jayhawks; this is the pattern from which scores of imitations were drawn.

The Jayhawks are marvels for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their ability to
combine spare country rock with matter-of-fact urgency. But perhaps the band's greatest
triumph – even above the fact that it manages to flourish in a Minneapolis music scene that
has more to do with dissonance than innocence – is that it proves once and for all that
simplicity and grace don't have to be bland and, more important, that it's possibl... More >