Neilson Hubbard

Neilson Hubbard, a singer and songwriter rooted in Mississippi, first performed as part of a cover band devoted to Galaxie 500 material. Yet his own songs revealed no spiritual or musical kinship with slowcore’s originators until the second solo release, which came after he had already led the Nashville-based outfit This Living Hand—an artsy college-rock group whose sound recalled the mid-period Feelies and which had evolved directly out of that earlier cover project. When the band dissolved in 1996, Hubbard moved back to his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, and issued his debut solo effort, 1997’s The Slide Project. That album arrived as an unexpected Kinks-y burst of indie guitar pop bearing no resemblance to anything he had previously recorded, and the stylistic departure remained an isolated one. Once he joined the Parasol Records roster, Hubbard delivered the musically translucent and heartbreakingly sad Why Men Fail in April 2001. Two years later he returned with Sing Into Me, again on Parasol.