Laura Cantrell - Humming By The Flowered Vine [20th Anniversary Edition]

Long before she made records of her own, Laura Cantrell was already country music's most devoted student, hosting WFMU's Radio Thrift Shop and championing the genre's forgotten corners to a New York audience that had no idea it needed a history lesson in Buck Owens and George Jones. By the time she released her third album in 2005, that scholarship had become second nature. Humming by the Flowered Vine cemented her standing as the unofficial keeper of country's archive, a songwriter who could sit her own material beside the greats and let it hold its ground.

The record moves fluidly between originals and carefully chosen covers, pulling in songs from Lucinda Williams, Wynn Stewart, and the traditional ballad "Poor Ellen Smith" alongside Cantrell's own "Khaki & Corduroy" and "Old Downtown." "Bees," co-written with Jay Sherman-Godfrey, was written in memory of BBC broadcaster John Peel, one of Cantrell's earliest and most vocal champions. Producer JD Foster surrounded her clear, unhurried voice with a loose, warm band that included Dave Schramm, Joey Burns, and John Convertino, giving the whole record a lived-in glow rather than a Nashville sheen.

Critics heard a songwriter working at the height of her powers, drawing frequent comparisons to Lucinda Williams for her knack of finding profound truths in plain language, and the album landed on Amazon's list of the year's best. Nearly two decades on, it remains one of the clearest statements of what made Cantrell essential: the sense that every old song she touched, and every new one she wrote, belonged to the same long American story.

This 20th anniversary edition returns Humming by the Flowered Vine to vinyl freshly remastered, with a previously unreleased bonus track added for the occasion. A welcome reissue of a quietly definitive record.