Cracker

Call Cracker's new album, Greenland, many things: haunting, bittersweet or the band's best work since its underrated mid-'90s masterpieces, Kerosene Hat and The Golden Age. Just don't call it mature. "Usually, mature, when you read that in a rock review, means that it's a boring record," laughs frontman David Lowery, via phone from a recording studio where he is both producing the acclaimed alt-country band Lucero and playing trains with his three-year-old son. "'Paul Westerberg has written his most mature record to date.' Like, oh, shit, it's going to be boring. But me and [guitarist] Johnny [Hickman], we're both in our forties now, we've been doing this for twenty-something years...hold on. I've got to spin my three-year-old tyrant around in his chair. This is the time of your life when you start deleting people from your address book — because they're dead." Cracker is also touring behind Greatest Hits Redux, re-recorded versions of the band's best-known songs released on the same day that Cracker's former label, Virgin, released Get On With It: The Best of Cracker. "We didn't tell [Virgin] about [Redux]," Lowery explains. "We just asked ourselves what every good rock band should, which is 'What would Andy Kaufman do?'"