featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
October 3, 2026
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
The Friday before Halloween didn't really present us with a huge slate of stuff from which to select our One Record. I don't know that there is another country traditionalist that we appreciate more than Ags Connolly. And both Sam Burton and Zach Stephenson offered satisfying collections. While it's our preference to review real live LPs as opposed to EPs, we've chosen to buck that trend and show some appreciation for Lydia Loveless. Again.
IF YOU ONLY LiSTEN to ONE RECORD THiS WEEK
Over the nearly twenty years of R&B, there are few if any artists whose music we've championed more than Lydia Loveless. But perhaps you're new here, in which case we'd refer you to a 2024 edition of our Lookback Machine wherein we highlighted our thirty favorite Lydia Loveless cuts - it's a really good listen, a solid survey of their career.
Produced with Matt Ross-Spang, Loveless' new Accolades EP (Bloodshot) is as deserving of critical accolades as anything the Ohio writer has released recently. While they have spoken about a deliberate turn away from their typical soul-mining in favor of a lyrical storytelling approach, the five (or six) songs here are barbed and biting. On the title cut, Loveless declares, I'm gonna go down in a deep dark hole / And try to find what's left of my soul / And while I'm there I'll write what I know. Even tumbling through this drama, their songs are clever and even fun at times. On "Oklahoma", a male chorus sings Sooner / Sooner or later.
Decamping to Memphis and putting more of their sound into the hands of Ross-Spang, Accolades is a great-sounding project, from John Calvin Abney's keys to the horns and woodwinds that fill out "Avoiding Highways" and "Let Me Get My Hopes Up", where Loveless sings, The world feels like a whirly-bird / That's come to carry all my happiness away. "What We Learned" was written for a Drive-by Truckers collaboration that has yet to materialize (but that would be a phenomenal idea), built on guitars and muscular drums and a lifetime of inherited interpersonal trauma: Regret lights up your face / Just like the dawn.
We fell in love with Lydia Loveless on their solidly alt.country debut, and across seven albums they've successfully coaxed and prodded their sound across pop and indie soundscapes. At heart, Loveless has remained a stellar songwriter with a powerhouse vocal and a stream of self-sabotage a mile wide. "Avoiding Highways" presents them as a resentful roots rock balladeer: I'm waiting for my next big shot / To blow up like the Old Spaghetti Warehouse down the street. The skittering drum and lyrical flow of the title track lend the opener a melodic pop heartbeat.
Loveless' range as a vocalist and a writer is actually most evident between that opening cut and the closer, another take on "Accolades". The closer is constructed on an acoustic strum, with the singer seeming more reflective and less confident. The difference between the versions is remarkable, the arrangement for the latter slowly disintegrating into clatter and noise as Loveless invests an increased vitriol in lines like, There's gotta be more than a world of shit / With blown off limbs and chances missed. The EP is a few songs short of a full-length, but provides a complete picture of Lydia Loveless as a fully-invested writer who has become essential to our kind of music.
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