Time (The Revelator) (2001)

Recorded at Nashville's RCA Studio B with little more than two guitars and two voices, this album strips roots music to its bones. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings weave old mountain folklore into modern unease: Ruination Day ties the sinking of the Titanic to Lincoln's assassination, and the closing I Dream a Highway unfolds over a quarter of an hour. Here Americana is not nostalgic costume but a ghostly conversation between American myth and the present.