Americana

Americana takes in a broad patchwork of genres — from alternative country to zydeco — all of them linked by a main line to the North American cultural matrix. We've got a wanderin' Johnny Cash singing about his lucky graveyard boots on "Further on Up the Road", Lucinda Williams on the by-ways of rural U.S.A. with "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road", and Americana grandaddies the Band narrating what goes down "Up on Cripple Creek". The heart of the U.S. opens up, musically, in Next Steps.

Among the most ambitious of current Americana stars is Sufjan Stevens, who announced his intention to record a concept album dedicated to each of the 50 U.S. states — the labour of a lifetime. "For the Windows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" features his trademark banjo-based minimalism. Florida's Iron & Wine hooks up with Arizona's Calexico on "He Lays in the Reins", which seems to kick up its own dust cloud as it rumbles across Americana's eternal horizon. Complete your expansive quilt of American sound in Deep Cuts.

These tracks are as diverse as the States themselves — a mixed bag of accents, attitudes, and perspectives that spans a stripped-down post-Monkees Michael Nesmith with 1972's "Two Different Roads", the rumbling New Orleans voodoo vibes of Dr. John ("I Walk on Guilded Splinters"), and the outlaw country blues of Keith Sykes ("Baby Took a Limo to Memphis").

Americana is a continental thing — a handful of the artists included among these Essentials are Canadian (Bruce Cockburn, the Be Good Tanyas, Robbie Robertson from the Band), which means that what you're getting here is alternative North America in its splendid musical entirety. This is not the landscape seen from the mainstream, but from the back-roads — a musical geography of places rich in local colour, sometimes so different from one another they may as well exist in separate countries. Sure, the playlist is heavy on acoustic twang and country drawl, but the devil is in the details. Go on, explore.