"I was thinking about artists I like, whether it's Bob Dylan or R.L. Burnside, and all the unreleased stuff they've put out there," Farrar says, "and it motivated me to dig through the vault a bit."

Among the highlights is Son Volt's...

Before Uncle Tupelo's No Depression sneaked out of Belleville, Ill., in 1990, the respective sounds of Sonic Youth and Lynyrd Skynyrd probably never occupied a common thought, let alone the same song. Yet the first track on that album obliterated any boundaries – real or imagined – that may have existed between those two bands. The pickin' was pure Second Helping, the dissonance straight...

Uncle Tupelo knows a thing or two about exorcising demons. No Depression, the debut album by the Belleville, Illinois, trio, was one of the loudest, loneliest wails in recent memory to arise from the Midwest's recession-plagued plains. With Still Feel Gone, its stirring second outing. Uncle Tupelo has proven itself to be the poetic voice of small-town isolation and smoky-barroom...