Neko Case

In an era when Shania Twain and Faith Hill are marketed as "country" artists, it's almost mandatory to look outside the scope of country music to find country music. While Neko Case likely won't ever share the country charts with LeAnn Rimes, she's keeping country's flame alive by preserving its spirit, rather than its trappings. Just listen to "I Wish I Was the Moon," and you can hear the echoes of Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee.

Of course, Neko Case isn't only about country. With Canadian indie supergroup the New Pornographers' "Letter from an Occupant," she allows her inner Veruca Salt to come out, while "Dirty Knife" exposes the darker side of her nature. Her pop-inflected "Train from Kansas City" tastefully employs a Beatles-esque stutter-beat (think "Ticket to Ride").

The Corn Sisters' "She's Leaving Town" is a post-modern nod to a sound pioneered in the '50s by Decca Records producer Owen Bradley when he was working with the likes of Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, and Patsy Cline. She reaches deep into the roots of Appalachian folk for a stunning version of "Wayfaring Stranger." And in the track to 2006's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood she solidifies her standing as a lyric poet of the first order.

Sometimes you have to step outside country music to get into it. The Nashville machine has always held a share of female outsiders in its tentative embrace, from Rosanne Cash in the '80s and k.d. lang and Michelle Shocked in the '90s, right through Shelby Lynne, who has reinvented herself more frequently than Madonna. On a purely sonic level, Neko Case probably shares more with the Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmins than she does with any of the aforementioned "outsider" predecessors, but she (along with Cash, Shocked, lang, and Lynne) has a reverence for classic country music that seeps into her recordings, albeit from left field.