Jeff Tweedy in three albums.

THE INCEPTION! Uncle Tupelo ★★★★ No Depression (ROCKVILLE, 1990)

The debut that defined a genre, due to its particular musical and psychic confluence: at the end of a decade glossed by greed, its raw songs’ emotional power was forged in punk rage and folk song purity, lending the ‘Depression’ of The Carter Family’s title song new resonance. In Tweedy and Jay Farrar’s complementary voices, this fusion evinced hope amid the darkness, if only through the bottom of a glass: “Whiskey bottle over Jesus/Not forever, just for now.” KC

THE REINVENTION! Wilco ★★★★★ Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (NONESUCH, 2002)

The record that got Wilco dropped from Warners, only to be picked up by another arm of the same label and go on to sell half a million copies, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot signalled Tweedy’s own psychic dissonance with songs as starkly lovely as Jesus Etc. or as melodically robust as War On War dissolving into static noise that blooms and fizzes – like film burn on the big screen. JB

THE PRODUCTION! Mavis Staples ★★★★ If All I Was Was Black (ANTI-, 2017)

Tweedy’s work as a producer has no better advertisement than his four LPs with the soul family Staples, one posthumous beauty for Pops (2015’s Don’t Lose This), the rest with Mavis, this being the latest in a seven-year relationship. As main songwriter, Tweedy frames her sociopolitical agenda – racism, poverty, police brutality, pleas for universal love and tolerance – in warm band settings that allow for a voice that’s gentler these days. But there is bite too (his guitar on Try Harder), and uplift (We Go High). He clearly understands her. GB