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. 

Fifteen years and tens of thousands of miles later, Easton, then a newly minted Nashville resident, became an early adopter in the East Nashville arts boom and returned to Alex the Great to record Not Cool. Noticing the desperation of some less-established transplants trying to get noticed, he was determined to not simply make another singer-songwriter record. He collected a troop of Nashville performing vets in Joe Fick, JD Simo and Jon Radford, as well as a couple fellow newcomers, violinist Megan Palmer and guitarist Sadler Vaden. The chemistry was immediate; they blazed through an astonishing six songs on day one of tracking. Not Cool, despite its antithetical-to-Nashville name, was in American Songwriter’s top 50 albums of that year. 

“Not Cool is the record, from start to finish, that I call my best album,” Easton said. “Any one of the twenty songs on these two albums still rings a bell in my book. No disrespect to any of my albums, but these two are my favorites.”