Top Ten Americana Albums of 2008

Picking the best folk and Americana records of the year isn’t nearly as hard as discarding those great records that just didn’t feel right stuck in the category.

Releases by Calexico and DeVotchKa felt far too worldly to pigeonhole as folk or country, for instance, while Blitzen Trapper’s fantastic Furr smells more like the Kinks than Neil Young. [Editor’s note: That’s why we put it on our indie-rock list.] We likewise discarded Shearwater’s near-masterpiece Rook, despite the fact that the album’s instrumentation includes both banjo and a hammered dulcimer. And while we certainly returned to releases by Bon Iver and Bowerbirds throughout the year, we actually heard both records last year, when they were first independently released.

After this arduous vetting process, these are the records that survived: ten releases that dabble equally in meat-and-potatoes alt-country, soft-focus ’70s pop folk, and the old, weird America of Greil Marcus.

As a Zooey Deschanel character once put it, long before she ever met M. Ward: “Listen and light a candle, and your future will become clear.”