Discovery / Wea
1994
Five Days in July
About This Album
Blue Rodeo's best album -- and the first of a trilogy of brilliant records that would feature the band at its most epic, brave, and experimental (also featuring Nowhere to Here and Tremolo) -- Five Days in July began with Daniel Lanois' advice to the bandmembers that they not be confined by a recording studio, so they dragged their equipment out to Greg Keelor's farmland home and made what is essentially the ultimate "campfire" album. With the exception of the dynamite harmonic cover of Rodney Crowell's "Till I Gain Control Again," the songs have a loose, stoney feel about them -- both Keelor's and Jim Cuddy's works feel like they just kind of organically evolved, which actually makes a whole lot of sense given the circumstances under which they were written and recorded. This is the album that at once solidified Blue Rodeo's position as the main trailblazers of contemporary alt-country and one that became a career-defining benchmark by which all their later work would be measured. The fact that their Small Miracles tour in 2008 was still made up of half of this record should be indicative of its incredible importance in the Blue Rodeo canon.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,6,7 and 10)

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