JACKSON, Miss. - For seminal alt-country band Blue Mountain--torn apart by divorce--breaking up was hard to do. Getting back together, it turned out, was pretty easy.
The Mississippi trio will release its sixth studio album, "Midnight in Mississippi," along with a re-recorded greatest hits album, "Omnibus," on Tuesday. It's an event fans would not have imagined seven years ago when the band broke up after singer-guitarist Cary Hudson and bassist Laurie Stirratt split.
It's not a scenario the band envisioned back in 2001. But when the organizers of a festival broached the idea in the spring of 2007, Stirratt and Hudson decided to give it a try.
"Enough time had past," Stirratt said. "It took me a while to let things go. You just have to work through that stuff. It takes a few years. Divorce is really awful. A lot of people go through that more than once and I don't know how they do it. I mean once was enough for me."
Though their personal relationship is gone, their chemistry isn't. "Midnight in Mississippi" picks up right where the band left off. It's full of the kind of songs that made the band, with Frank Coutch on drums, one of the most popular of the reactionary movement against pop country.
They return in an era when country music--and the music industry as a whole--seems to have lost its way again.
"We're in this time when you have to be young and pretty. We've gone back to that," said Grant Alden, co-founder of the alternative country champion No Depression magazine.
Back in the early '90s, Blue Mountain joined bands like Son Volt, Bottle Rockets and Freakwater in a group that served as a second generation of country outlaws. The music sounded a little like country, but was influenced by the blues and rock 'n' roll and came with a distinctly anti-Nashville attitude.
Blue Mountain appeared on the cover of No Depression's second issue.
"There were a lot of people 10 or 15 years ago who were putting on funny clothes and playing some kind of country music who were dabbling," Alden said. "Blue Mountain was really authentic. They were blending country, blues and rock in an interesting way that only two or three bands were doing."
