Biography

1994: The year that saw, amidst a spasm of hubris, boredom and naiveté, the release of Bloodshot Records’ first CD, the compilation, For A Life of Sin. 11 years and 125 releases later, we’d learned some hard lessons and spent many a sleepless night wrestling in the venal snake pit that is the music industry.

To celebrate surviving in this racket, we’ve bypassed the usual retrospective route and hammered out a 42 song, 2 disc collection with a 24-page color booklet featuring only NEW and PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED TRACKS. On board are current and past members of the Bloodshot family like Bobby Bare Jr., Bottle Rockets, Waco Brothers, Kelly Hogan, Old 97s, Wayne Hancock and Graham Parker, good friends we’ve made along the way like Sixteen Horsepower, Richard Buckner, Minus 5, Crooked Fingers, Andrew Bird, Handsome Family and My Morning Jacket, and a few folks we’ve long admired like Dr. Ralph Stanley, John Doe, and Hank Williams III. (See the full line up to the left).

Since the beginning, Bloodshot has been, in many ways, a damned enterprise. By not bothering with stylistic strait jackets, we haven’t made it too easy for anyone to get a solid grasp on what we do or what to call it- some of the time, we don’t even know. We’ve always loved the music that exists between the clearly defined genres, nestled in the dark, nebulous cracks where punk and country and soul and pop and bluegrass and rock mix and mingle and mutate. We’ve always been drawn to artists unafraid of molesting and caressing roots forms and tropes to create strange and wonderful new sounds.