Not that changing attitudes bothered Farrar much before that either. He’s pretty well set on his musical course. And that course sits between biting, guitar-heavy rock and a dustier acoustic sound, paved with stream-of-consciousness lyrics, elemental melodies that spiral downward like rusty springs, a stiff-jawed delivery and a voice fractured and forceful like a whine, though not as overtly emotional. Farrar cares little for faddish particulars like how en vogue alt-country—the descriptor most often applied to his music—might be at any given moment, or whether that’s even what it’s called at all.

“[In Uncle Tupelo] we were doing it before there was any designation or terminology to put on us,” Farrar says. “What categorization it was wasn’t of any importance when we started, so I just kind of kept that sensibility throughout. The insistence on defining what it is with a term will ebb and flow and evolve, I think. There will probably be some new term in the next 10 years to describe bands that play country outside of Nashville.”

And considering all the previous generations of country-rock experiments—like Gram Parsons’ cosmic American music and Jason and the Scorchers’ cowpunk—he’s probably right.

Farrar laid the groundwork for his sound almost two decades ago during his Uncle Tupelo partnership with Jeff Tweedy. Since then he’s taken a few scenic routes (three solo albums and a Gob Iron side project with Anders Parker) and pit stops (an eight-year Son Volt hiatus and completely overhauled lineup), and veered a few degrees one way or another with each of the band’s five studio albums (horns and electric sitar give The Search a different tint than its predecessors), but he’s always stayed the course.

Plenty of new music strikes people’s ears in an urgent way at first, but rarely does it inspire a whole new magazine. No Depression arose to commend the fresh, rough-edged way Farrar, Tweedy and others were ramming grungy rock and country together. (Disclosure: This writer’s been contributing to ND for the past three years.) The magazine was chock full of Uncle Tupelo references. The name itself came from the title track of the band’s 1990 debut—a song also performed by the Carter Family a half-century earlier—and various departments were named after other Uncle Tupelo songs. “I never quite had a handle on it myself as to why they named their magazine that,” Farrar says.

By the time Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden started publishing No Depression in 1995, Farrar had left Uncle Tupelo and assembled Son Volt—serving as sole songwriter and frontman—so it was his new band that graced the magazine’s first cover.

“To be fair, the magazine evolved in terms of the quality of writing,” says Tennessean writer, No Depression senior editor and former Nashville Scene music editor Bill Friskics-Warren. “It began as a quasi-fanzine. But I think over the years, particularly the feature writing and the essays, moved into a real quality zone. I think it really met a need for people who had a hunger for thoughtful, more in-depth takes on musicians, ideas, genres, trends—whatever was at stake.”

The world of writing about alt-country and roots music is about to take a hard blow to the shins. Next month, No Depression will publish its 75th and final print issue. (More than anything else, that’s a reflection of how many fewer print ads record labels are buying these days.) But Farrar will keep soldiering on with Son Volt. They have five studio albums under their belts, and he says they may start on a sixth this fall.

Not only did No Depression cultivate high-quality writing over the years, it also widened the focus declared on its masthead from “Alt. Country (Whatever That Is)” to “Surveying the Past, Present, and Future of American Music (Whatever That Is).” (Obviously, the parameters have never quite been crystal clear.) Coverage-wise, that meant it gradually cast the net a bit wider, drawing in performers more diverse in age, race and style than strictly alt-country bands.

“The editors had that conversation about what direction to take the magazine at a time when a lot of the real darlings of the first couple years were kind of relinquishing their alt-country roots,” Friskics-Warren says. “Wilco was getting experimental, and the Jayhawks were saying, ‘We’re a pop band.’ The old guard sort of moved on, or at least didn’t want to be associated too closely with the alt-country movement. Those conversations we had were really interesting. A couple of us were pushing for what folks referred to as the American Mojo. We didn’t go that direction. But the magazine did broaden to a more general roots music publication with an emphasis on American musical vernacular.”

No Depression successfully pursued its search for laudable music beyond Uncle Tupelo- and Son Volt-style bands, but—on the other side of the coin—there are other less alt-country elements to Farrar’s own music that don’t often get attention. Blues is one. It’s there in the dark, bending unison vocal-guitar riffs during “Damn Shame” on Farrar’s first solo LP, Sebastopol, and during “Action” and “Automatic Society” on The Search.

“I guess any blues influence does get ignored to a certain degree, just because everything in the world as we know it likes to be categorized and put into compartments,” says Farrar. “But from my perspective, the blues influence has always been there. Some of my earliest memories of going to clubs were listening to blues musicians here in St. Louis—James Crutchfield, Henry Townsend—guys that have been doing it for 70, 80 years.”

And, though it’s submerged pretty deep most of the time, there’s a faint shade of pop sensibility in there too. (Look no further than the bright horns of “The Picture.”) That’s courtesy—in part—of Farrar’s having listened to The Beatles early on. Last year, Son Volt was even tapped to record “Hello Goodbye” for an ESPN spot.

“It was a McCartney song, so it wasn’t really a song that I’d ever played,” Farrar says. “I didn’t know I could sing a McCartney song. I guess I can.”

Farrar applied his own downward-turning singing style. “Some of that was probably born out of not being able to hit the high notes like McCartney, because I’m more familiar with singing Lennon songs,” he says. “His range is a little bit lower, I think.”

It’s no longer quite so shocking to hear a brooding, Midwestern mash-up of loud guitars, pedal steel and blue-collar abstractions—hell, it’s more of a shock to hear Farrar cover McCartney for a David Beckham TV ad. But—unlike a lot of other music that’s been around for a little while—Farrar’s still has plenty of muscle.