- Valentine - It's hard to have a muted song with horns throughout the chorus, and Bare doesn't really try, beyond slightly muting, in both senses, them. There's some nice juxtiposition of upbeat/tempo music and a guy sining about killing his valentine.
- Where is my mind - cover of the Pixies song (best known for closing Fight Club). His version is subdued and sparse, with vocals and a guitar.
Rhett Miller - Lead singer of the Old 97's
- Singular Girl - This song is from KEXP's Song of the Day podcast, and was recorded live in their studio. The studio version appears on the geneally lackluster The Believer, where it seems that Rhett Miller forgot that he had any soul or passion. Thankfully, the KEXP version restores life to a beautiful but previously moribund composition. Best line: "Talking to you girl is like long division"
- Four Eyed Girl - From The Instigator, his second solo release. When combined with Singular Girl, it's obvious that Miller has some notion of what it is to date a shy, geeky kind of girl. Plus, both songs are funny. "Yeah, I tell her that I love her and don't care who knows it / What's it take? A romance with red wine and roses? / She gets the picture, takes her pity on me / she lets go, she let's it happen / it's a hot spell after a cold snap / my eyes are open, nobody's nappin' she says 'you don't want to miss a moment of me'"
- Hover - "Later in a room / picture of a girl / it doesn't do her justice / what it does is make you realize that you ought to be her / I'm talking 'bout right now / Yeah I mean this instant"
- Our Love - The opening track of The Instigator. A supremely infectious song about love, shockingly enough. It shares some of the uptempo feeling from the Old 97's Too Far To Care, and really, really makes me wish I had some sense of rythym, 'cause I wanna dance to this.
- The El - I'm predisposed to liking songs about Chicago, and I love how the drumbeats almost feel like a distant train.
Old 97's - This band can do anything possible in the Alt-Country catalog. They're funny, passionate, talented and absolutely worth listnening to.
- Big Brown Eyes - It's not too often that a band covers itself. The Wreck Your Life version is has less instrumentation and feels slower than the cut from Too Far To Care, and the vocals from Wreck Your Life are more forlorn. Both are excellent, which is why you have them.
- Timebomb - The lead song from Too Far To Care. It's not fair to the rest of Alt-Country that this is what I think of as the pinnacle of the genre. They have too much fun for anyone else to hope to compete, and the pace of the song is just short of frenetic, which makes a lot of sense when the song compares love to having a timebomb inside of you.
- Victoria - More of a straight country song, and I mean that in the best of ways. Not the faux-country that's being called country now, but good, solid stuff with soul behind it.
- W-I-F-E "I've got my wife, the other women and whiskey killing me. The first two makes it so's that I see red, the third one makes it so's that I can't see." Just awesome, and another in a more traditional country vein.
- W. Texas Teardrops - One of the few 0ld 97's songs that Rhett Miller doesn't sing lead for, and it picks up significant more twang. It's from Too Far To Care, so it has a pretty good pace to go along with the extra-countrification.