1. Radiohead Kid A 2000
2. Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 2002
3. Arcade Fire Funeral 2004
4. Sufjan Stevens Come on Feel the Illinoise! 2005
5. Gillian Welch Time (The Revelator) 2001
6. The Hold Steady Separation Sunday 2005
7. The National Boxer 2007
8. Liars Drum's Not Dead 2006
9. Neko Case Fox the Confessor 2006
10. Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago 2008

Top Ten

1. Wilco and The Jayhawks at the Kentucky Theater in Lexington, KY 1995
Wilco opened the show and both bands ripped through their new releases nearly cover to cover with some Uncle Tupelo and a fair amount of Hollywood Town Hall for good measure. Mark Olsen's wife Victoria Williams joined The Jayhawks for several songs including "Miss Williams' Guitar" and their raucous closer "Ten Little Kids," then both bands took the stage for a crazy Golden Smog encore of "Red Headed Stepchild." 1995 was the year alt-country seemed to coalesce and emerge under the larger rock-n-roll umbrella. It was the year No Depression Magazine formed to document the movement and it was the year I saw two of its pioneering and most enduring icons generate the electricity that powered the movement through its heyday and well beyond.

2. Jon Langford with Sally Timms and the Burlington Welsh Male Chorus at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, CA 2008
After seeing Langford's Waco Brothers on Saturday afternoon the idea of catching the bright eyed Welshman and some of his friends first thing Sunday morning was supposed to be like warmed up and welcome leftovers. What we got was Christmas dinner in October. The line-up was essentially the Wacos and they played with as much energy and swagger as they had twenty hours earlier. Oh, and did I mention the thirty-or-so full grown Canadian men singing behind them? They played Jon's songs, sea chanteys, mining and labor songs but to be honest they could have been singing Row Row Row Your Boat and I would have marched out and bought a boat to row that very day. Never underestimate the power of the human voice, especially when amplified and backed by a kick-ass band. It's the sort of thing I'll never forget or likely see again.

3. The Knitters at The Palms Playhouse in Winters, CA 2008
First of all The Palms looks and feels like the kind of place you might go for a wedding reception. You have to walk up a flight of stairs slightly wider than the ones in most apartment buildings, tickets are checked by a guy with a little wicker basket who will absolutely remember your face if you have to go back to your car for something and the bar sells as much coffee as beer. It seats 220 people. My friends and I sat up front and were treated to a rockabilly show that might as well have been in my driveway. There's no such thing as security there so I was able to tell Dave Alvin thanks in person after the set and John Doe's brother sold Amy a t-shirt. The highlight was an extended Obama-dedicated romp through "The New World" with a verse of the Beatles "Revolution" nicely covered in the middle. The Knitters clearly love what they're doing and it's easy to see why. Hearing them play so close to home and with such good friends made the love that much easier to feel.

4. Wilco w/ Preston School of Industry, Bogarts, Cincy 2002
We caught this show during our last pre-child visit to Kentucky (though Amy was pregnant). Dave Mikkelsen met us there. We missed most of the Preston School of Industry set but we were there for one thing and one thing only... Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The ink was still drying on its reviews which we all remember raving about its groundbreaking experimentation, trashing its departure from traditional roots music or avoiding the issue altogether to focus on the band's label and line-up changes. YHF created a rare sort of excitement and the band captured and amplified it that night. To my delight Tweedy and Co. drew heavily from Being There, leading off the set with "Misunderstood" and its tightrope-taught coda which had Tweedy shouting "nothing" in the closing line for a full minute. This was a bigger, bolder, smarter Wilco - a Wilco that would soon take over the world. They played all the new songs and interpretations of favorites plus a few surprises including the then unreleased "Handshake Drugs" and "Kicking Television." For me and many others YHF was a watershed moment in a genre we already loved and respected. Catching Wilco live in that moment was as rare and special a thing as I could have hoped.

5. Vic Chesnutt at Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco, CA 1998
So the evening started dubiously with scheduled opener David Gray sitting in the front pew with a cold that kept him off stage while Maria McKee writhed on the piano bench and sang opera-bar interpretations of her own songs. In contrast Chesnutt was a pinned butterfly, a beautiful tragedy who forced the salvation of his own music through a badly patched vessel. His hands struggled with his instrument and he forgot the words of songs that were either too new and unrehearsed or too old and infrequently remembered. His stories were frank and sweet and ached with gallows humor so we ached with him. When the pieces came together, notes and phrases that could only be his, it was like discovering cut crystal in a dusty room. Hard, fragile, and perfect - glimmering shards reflecting the mess all around.

6. Phish at Red Rocks Ampitheater in Colorado 1995
The morning of the show I woke up with the intense memory of a dream in which I knew what it was like to be bald. Before the rest of the house was awake I walked down The Hill to a barber and had her shave my head. That night we bought some huge brownies in the parking lot and ate them like we were actually hungry. Everyone took turns rubbing my stupid bald head while the band played tons of stuff from Rift, an amazing version of "Run Like an Antelope" and stretched "Tweezer" for about fifteen minutes. All was virtuoso jam band bliss then the entire audience was abducted by aliens while walking to their cars. No kidding.

7. Lyle Lovett and his Large Band at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA 1998
Lovett is the Texas definition of classy, and the beautiful Art-deco interior of the Paramount allowed him to woo the crowd with just the right amount of aw-shucks respect to share in a certain sense of wonder. His large band easily expanded and contracted to showcase the best, most nuanced elements of the man's songs while his sideways smile lightly leavened his always achingly honest singing voice. I for one walked away a little more humble and very happy.

8. Okkervil River at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, CA 2009
Will Sheff and mates have developed a tight and exciting stage show with some pat but rewarding routines - enciting the crowd to clap in double-time during "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe" from The Stage Names - but it all came off as genuine and enthralling. When the show ended I felt as if I somehow had a hand in the set list and understood the gravitas, humor and irony of songs like "John Allyn Smith Sails" more completely. Sheff announced that this was their last show of a long tour and that they would really miss all of us, then, as if to squeeze every last bit fun from their journey, launched into a barn burning, string breaking "Unless It's Kicks" to close. What gives this mess some grace unless it's fiction? The songs, the stories, even the show is a work of fiction, a messy rock-n-roll act intended to illicit all the right feelings - but for an hour in October I felt its grace and believed every word.

9. Modest Mouse at Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco, CA 2000 or 01
The Moon and Antarctica had been playing in my house and car and head for the better part of the year so it was great to finally hear all the hopeless cosmic pathos of "Third Planet" and "Paper Thin Walls" explode among lighthearted gems "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" and "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset." The best part might have been hearing Isaac Brock call some guy an asshole for shouting out "COWBOY DAN!!" in between every song. And yes, they played "Cowboy Dan."

10. Peter Gabriel headlining the WOMAD festival in Boston, MA 1994
However you may feel about his post-So output there is no arguing the man's ability to put on an up-to-the-minute high tech show. He made the favorites bigger than life and he highlighted new material from Us with guest performers and dazzling effects, but most of all he used the massive venue and hand-held digital video technology to make the audience feel like it was both on stage and out of our minds, using his formidable show to bring the audience closer to the experience rather than set himself farther apart.

1. Bear in Heaven Beast Rest Forth Mouth
2. The Antlers Hospice
3. Mt. Eerie Wind's Poem
4. Califone All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
5. Bonnie Prince Billy Beware
6. John Doe & The Sadies Country Club
7. Monsters of Folk s/t
8. Elvis Costello Secret, Profane and Sugarcane
9. Wolfmother Cosmic Egg
10. Sufjan Stevens The BQE
11. Elvis Perkins in Dearland The Doomsday EP
12. The Hold Steady A Positive Rage box set

Bennett continued recording after Wilco, releasing four solo albums including "The Palace at 4am" with fellow Chicagoan Edward Burch and "Bigger Than Blue," both excellent examples of the heartfelt and pop-soaked Americana Bennett did so well, and both fine additions to the genre on their own merits. Bennett was a true hidden talent, an often under appreciated performer, producer and artist whose greatest contributions lie just beneath the surface of things you know and love so well.

My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Maybe it's all the lists I've been reading on Facebook or my recession-era spending down-turn, but lately I've been going back to the the artists who matter most to me. After an album or two some artists are cemented into the architecture of my personal pop culture while others will forever hang on the walls like cherished but interchangeable decorations. Some have earned my unyielding devotion without an album I'd put in the top ten and some will get a second listen no matter how much I disliked their last performance. Absent are the acclaimed luminaries who simply don't resonate the way they probably should, the artists whose importance I understand and respect intellectually but who never really took hold.

Ranging from blindly reverent to heavily qualified, these are the artists whose personae, politics, mythology and - most importantly - music have established an artistic integrity that will keep me coming back in good times and bad.

I subscribed for a few years (issues #30-58), bought a few t-shirts and have always been happy to associate myself, even if just as a fan, with a group of people committed to the free spirit of American music. Like the music it examined, the magazine allowed me to sit and take my time, look for new things and reflect on the old ones - practices for which computer monitors and streaming mp3 files seem poorly suited. It also kept me informed with what was coming down the pike with greater credibility than other magazines or music sites compromised by too many vendors with interests outside the music. I always found something new to like in No Depression, and learned something about the artists I already love. Thank you No Depression, my best to you and yours. See you 'round.

A friend shared with me some advice a record store clerk gave him: when demo-ing a new album skip the first three tracks and listen to track #4. The logic is obvious - labels/bands front load discs to grab your attention, kind of like putting your best foot forward. If there is going to be a break in continuity or weakness in their game the earliest it is likely to show up is track four. So cut to the chase, see what the album is really made of, start with track four.

Compiled below are the best track fours money can buy, the track fours that make rather than break their albums. A note: with two exceptions* greatest hits and live albums were not considered due to their padded track lists.

Let me walk that back a few steps. Album is not bad. It is not distasteful or poorly executed, unoriginal or listless. It's a decent rock record full of moody little DIY tunes including stand-out single "Hellhole Ratrace." It's believable and at times charming, never over-reaching in concept or execution. Their sound is something like Elvis Costello singing Beach Boys songs through the lens of Hardcore-era Pulp. But Costello is best when he's howling for the cheap seats, Pulp played real perversion like a bawdy joke and The Beach Boys - now over-referenced icons of sun-emo* jangle-pop - were ultimately 1960's snapshot storytellers and merchants of Americana just like Warhol and his silk-screened soup cans. Girls choose to moan when they might howl, leer when they might wink and blur their captured images in favor of form over subject. Album fails to provide the ecstatic release or profound realization needed to either overcome or earn its own icky origins or set them apart from their heroes and peers.

Sadly I won't be surprised to hear one day that Owens died prematurely of his own instability, and that would be too bad. Everyone deserves a second chance and this seems to be his so I really hope it works out. Also sadly, I am all but certain that Girls and Album will evaporate into pop culture's easily erased digital memory before you can say Arctic Monkeys.

* sunny + emotive = sun-emo. I just made that up.

On more than a few tunes the expert and increasingly ubiquitous Jim James trades his beautifully strained tenor for a newly honed falsetto, presumably seeking to balance soulful and corny while reassuring us all that "it ain't evil baby, if ya ain't hurting anybody." Flaming Lips via Louisville, KY.

The band seems to have taken its moment on a larger pop stage to retract and reflect, telling smaller, stickier stories with odd and nostalgic flourishes rather than turning it up to 11. An unexpected, thoughtful, and rewarding if not always dazzling effort from a band unafraid.

Vernon's soulful falsetto, spare guitar arrangements and hints of Grizzly Bear's house-bound pop combine to create a wintry isolation slowly warmed from within by the poetry it has inspired; cloistered one-note ballads rub up against chanty folk hymns and gospel harmonies. A sure bet for fans of M. Ward and the acts mentioned above. Don't miss highlights "Skinny Love," "Blindsided" and the impossibly perfect closer "Re: Stacks."

This is their most varied and accessible album yet, starting off with the numbing riff/bash stadium noise rocker "Plaster Casts of Everything" - a song within a song, really - followed by "Houseclouds" which is a dead ringer for what Beck should have been doing instead of The Information. Most songs track pretty close to Drum's reductive atmosphere and night stalker tension, however the added buzz of guitar, saturated feedback loops, and rhythms aimed at listeners' asses rather than bowels makes the Liars sound more like an adventurous rock band than a talented trio of noisy artists. Add "accessible" to the oft used "experimental" tag they bear. Keep the "awesome" too.

I was listening to Summerteeth the other day and realized more clearly than before how "pop" the album is and why. It's Beatles, Beach Boys, Big Star pop - Liverpool to Surf City via Chicago. So I started thinking about other Wilco albums in terms of influences and a few things started making sense. Being There is a dark edged take on the Rolling Stones at their most soulful, and a perfect sophomore response to AM's cheeky, off the cuff take on life after Uncle Tupelo. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot nods to the desolate precision and glitchy open spaces of Brian Eno (an influence that probably earned them all the "America's Radiohead" comparisons), and A Ghost Is Born is equal parts Sonic Youth and Grateful Dead (Grateful Youth? Sonic Dead?). Sky Blue Sky is their album as Bob Dylan and The Band - respectful and poetic basement jamming around ideas large and small. Its the kind of thing that can only happen after everyone knows each other pretty well and there is plenty of room to share. Maybe their most Dad Rock album yet, Wilco sounds relaxed, focused and in sync with one another. You can hear echoes of the rangy rock confessional indulged by Loose Fur and still smell the backyard bbq left behind from the last Golden Smog album. No one is working to earn a permanent spot in the band and no one is trying to change the world. They seem to be trying - with success - to have some fun and make something worth keeping.