Children’s choirs, café chatter, hand claps, ticking clocks and ambient noise liven the mix and dispel the feeling of gimmickry. Nearly all of the 16 songs on One Plus One Is One feature ADD-accomodating instrumental and dynamic shifts. His fourth release-a much sparer, acoustic creation-is no less carefully arranged. The poorly illustrated Damon Gough had already proven himself a masterful arranger, deftly weaving vignettes, tangents, instrumental interludes and miniature movements into the space of three- to five-minute pop songs. Badly Drawn Boy: One Plus One Is One (2004) We limited our list to two albums per artist, and even then only noting second albums from a handful of key artists. But these are the albums our music writers and editors felt were the very best indie-folk albums ever made. There was plenty of argument among our staff about who was too hard-rock, too straight alt-country or just didn’t fit our definitions. There’s overlap with alt-country, coffeehouse singer/songwriters, orchestral pop and indie rock, but we did our best to grab albums that felt like “indie folk,” whether the artist was recorded in their bedroom or released it on a major label. These albums are filled with folky songs that would be at home on college radio next to post-rock and dance tracks.

Musically, we’re looking at that glorious amalgamation of tradition folk elements (acoustic instruments and vocal styles) with the burgeoning indie-rock scene-or, occasionally, electronic elements applied to folk music. In fact, reading through this list is overwhelmingly nostalgic, as much a time capsule of the writers and editors we’ve worked with these last 15 years as of the musicians who’ve often graced the cover and pages (both paper and virtual) of our magazine since its inception. In compiling our rankings here, we’ve defined its era as beginning in 1972 with Nick Drake’s seminal Pink Moon, being mostly ignored until the mid-’90s with acts like Elliott Smith and Gillian Welch, and then booming right around the time we launched Paste in 2002.

No music genre is particularly easy to define, but “indie folk” is about as nebulous as they come.

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