#9 Townes Van Zandt

Steve Earle once said, "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." I'm not sure Townes is better than Dylan, but he's certainly in the conversation. He really only had one "hit": "Pancho and Lefty", which was made famous by Willie and Merle. But Townes has hundreds of fantastic songs. Like Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, Nick Drake and countless others who flew under the radar in the 90s, Townes never got his due. Not even close.

I discovered Townes late. My closest buddy in college, who turned me onto countless artists that I'd embrace post-college (Smog, Oldham, Drake) was a fan early, but I still had much digging to do before I'd make my way to Townes. Must've been a few years after his death in 1997, that Townes started to hit. I remember buying the collection, High Low and In Between, at Sounds on St. Marks and immediately putting it into my.....portable CD player, and listening on the F train back to Brooklyn. Man, he went much deeper than "Pancho." I followed with Live at the Old Quarter and stayed with those two for probably a decade. And then the re-issues hit. All those early records. Oh my. Delta Momma Blues, Our Mother the Mountain, For the Sake of the Song. There were so many brilliant tracks deep in the Townes catalog. What's that line, maybe from High Fidelity: "If you're dating a girl, and you see a Nick Drake record in her collection, you marry her." I always felt that way about Townes. He's that good. So good that one day, after making my way through the entire TVZ catalog, I hit the realization that maybe Earle was right.

Favorite record: Townes Van Zandt (1969)

Where are they now? Townes died on New Years Day, 1997, at the age of 52.