Twenty-five years after its initial release, requests still roll in for the songs from Tim Easton’s Special 20. The record, produced at Nashville’s Alex the Great Recording in 1998 with producers Brad Jones and Robin Eaton, seems to have manifested the Americana music pathway Easton’s career would take.

The songs on Special 20 chronicle a little bit of real life mixed with a little bit of fiction: everything from obsessive young love to relationships taking unfortunate, drunken turns. It’s an amalgam of the romance of his rock ‘n’ roll college days and his turns as a solo street performer across Europe, as heavy on the electric guitar as the upright bass, rock attitude tempered with gentle folk. It was the new Nashville sound, made by an outsider, before even Nashville knew what was coming.