The Music That Made XPN, From the Mid-’80s Through the 2000s

When we chose “XPN Classics” as one of the themes for #TBTXPN, the Programming team started with one question: How do we define an XPN classic?

We began answering that question by the decades.

For me, it began in the late ’80s, when I was a volunteer overnight DJ. Back then, our on-air hosts were laying the groundwork for what XPN would sound like in the years ahead, building on the classic singer-songwriter traditions of the ’60s and ’70s, which were enjoying a revival in the mid-’80s. By the ’90s, with the rise of Lilith Fair, many of those artists became instant XPN listener favorites.

We mixed those voices with ’90s rock, alt, indie, and classic, plus R&B, blues, the emerging genre we now call Americana (though the term didn’t exist yet), and a sprinkling of hip-hop and world music. Artists like Indigo Girls, David Gray, Jeff Buckley, Damien Rice, Tori Amos, Los Lobos, Lucinda Williams, Shawn Colvin, Sheryl Crow, Wilco and Richard Thompson found a home and a future on XPN.

Looking deep beyond these foundational musicians  there were many musicians that you (and us) have come to love with exciting and colorful “new” sounds. Musicians like Beck, Flaming Lips, Moby, Belle and Sebastian, Portishead, Björk, and Arrested Development, many of whom you’d only hear on XPN at the time. Some of these songs may have faded from the airwaves, but they’re woven into the fabric of what makes XPN what it is today.

The early 2000s brought another wave: Norah Jones, Kathleen Edwards, Jim James and My Morning Jacket, Aimee Mann, Shelby Lynne, The Strokes, Gillian Welch, The White Stripes, and more. Together, they expanded the library of what we now think of as XPN classics.

That’s how we landed on the XPN classics that we played today for Throwback Thursday. The amount of music that we drew from the mid-80s through approximately 2010, is much more than we had airtime to play. Sorry if we didn’t get to your list of faves.

Back in 2008, we asked listeners to vote for their “Essential” XPN songs for our year-end countdown. You can see that list here. It’s been 17 years since then, and I often wonder how that list would look if we asked everyone to vote today.

As we picked songs for today’s set, we started a playlist. It’s far from complete, but it’s a snapshot of an incredibly rich period in XPN’s musical history.

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