Music and Lyrics
Unlike subsequent Whiskeytown releases, Faithless Street features other band members besides Adams on lead vocals - Wandscher sings two songs ("What May Seem Like Love" and "Top Dollar") and Cary sings one ("Matrimony"). Lyrically, a few of Adams' songs on the album were influenced by his hometown of Jacksonville, North Carolina. "Faithless Street" is the figurative name that Adams gave a low-rent housing area of Raleigh where he once lived.
The opening guitar figure on the album's first track ("Midway Park") was inspired by the guitar playing of Peter Buck.
The origin of the song "Lo-Fi Tennessee Mountain Angel (for Kathy Poindexter)" came from a conversation Adams had with Kathy Poindexter, who fronted a local Raleigh punk band named Picasso Trigger. Poindexter had recently written a song about Dolly Parton called "Lo-Fi Tennessee Mountain Angel". Adams loved the idea of someone writing a punk song about Parton so much that he wrote his own song about Poindexter.
Adams' verdict on Faithless Street: "I think it’s a strong youth album. It’s crazy. It loves what it borrows from musically: It tips its hat to Gram Parsons, it tips its hat to the Stones, it’s shaking hands with Uncle Tupelo on some levels." The young songwriter, in fact, loved the album so much that he talked Geffen Records into buying it from Mood Food Records so that it could be reissued on Outpost three years later.
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