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In the era of post-punk and grunge, groups ruled and singer-songwriters were thought limp and uncool. Solo artists tried to muddy that distinction by adopting handles that sounded like band names—bandonyms, as I’ve called them, such as Smog, the Mountain Goats, or Palace. Drawing on the “old, weird America” (in Greil Marcus’ problematic phrase) of country and hillbilly music was another way that artists who leaned toward introspective acoustic music could find a niche and some crucial mystique. There were many kinds of alt-country, but one of its functions was as a refuge for the singer-songwriter in an inhospitable time.

Underlining that fact is how quickly many of the best of them shed the country trappings. Most had resisted the alt-country label in the first place, with a typical Gen-X wariness toward branding—enough so that the genre’s flagship magazine No Depression felt compelled to tag itself the journal of “alternative country music (whatever that is).” But once they’d gotten established, many such artists started trucking down more esoteric roads.

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– http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2013/09/the_lumineers_and_mumford_sons_what_they_could_learn_from_neko_case.single.html