Looking back on the best twenty albums from the Country Universe era, there is a strong connection between the nineties country that shaped our musical tastes and the albums that best represent the genre from the last twenty years.
Our first entry won the CMA Award for Album of the Year, and one of our final entries produced four No. 1 country radio hits. While these are the only two albums that also produced one of our twenty best singles of the last twenty years, an additional five artists appear on both lists with albums that do not include their entries on the singles list. Thirteen other artists appear in our twentieth anniversary feature for the first time, and longtime readers can likely anticipate who some of them are!
Collectively, these albums are rich explorations of: genre and gender; race and romance; grief and gratitude; and love and lust, found and lost. We see brilliant singer-songwriters coming into their own, genre veterans embracing the album format without an eye on country radio, and even a few albums that fully deliver on the promise embedded in those formative nineties albums that made us lifelong fans of country music and keep us writing about it, long after our tastes have become unaligned with most of Music Row’s take on what country music should be.
We’ll post two entries a day, ten entries a week over the next two weeks, starting with two albums from genre legends who deserve entry into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Country Universe: A 20th Anniversary Retrospective
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