For most of the bands in my music collection, I have a clear memory of the first time I heard them, or heard of them, or decided they were someone I needed to know more about. Hazeldine is not one of those bands.

I know which album of theirs I heard first: Orphans, their covers-of-deep-cuts LP that included stellar folk-country-inflected versions of songs by everyone from Hazel Dickens to Peter Gabriel to Neutral Milk Hotel. Orphans came out in 1998, which was right when I was diving deep into what was coming to be known as alt-country, the white-punks-on-roots genre that first got on my radar via Uncle Tupelo and later exploded with the founding of Bloodshot Records in 1993.

Hazeldine wasn’t on that label, but they did have a song on Straight Outta Boone County, a Bloodshot compilation album that was my intro to a bunch of other musicians as well (Robbie Fulks, the Grievous Angels, Waycross). I don’t remember running out to buy Orphans after hearing Hazeldine covering the Stanley Brothers’ “I’m Lonesome Without You,” but clearly I did — or maybe I just happened by the “H” section of some giant record store like Tower or J&R, as still happened back then, recognized the band name, and figured they’d be worth checking out.

And that they were. Like a lot of roots-oriented bands at the time, the three women and one behind-the-drumkit dude in Hazeldine were taking indie-rock guitars and introspective lyrics and mixing in old-fashioned three-part harmonies. Listening back now to “Apothecary,” the first song on their debut LP How Bees Fly, I hear echoes of Bettie Serveert, Geraldine Fibbers, Madder Rose — a whole mini-universe of women on the edge of country, folk, and rock, mostly all just a bit too late for the Year of the Woman before rock radio turned its attention back to bands like Pearl Jam and (checks the Billboard listings) Hootie and the Blowfish. The next song, “Tarmac,” features the lyric “Hold me close/and kiss me low/and fuck me like Batman,” then launches into a jangle-guitar solo that would have ruled the airwaves a couple of years earlier. (In a radio edit, presumably.)

Hazeldine were more memorable musicians than songwriters: While they had a few memorable songs of their own, when I go back for re-listens, it’s mostly to Orphans, which borrows some obscurities from other songwriters and turns them inside-out to wonderful effect. And by the time I discovered Hazeldine, they were already fizzling out: They went on to release one last record in 2001, then split up. (Like many American alt-country bands, they seem to have had a bigger following in Europe than in the U.S.; How Bees Fly was released on the German label Glitterhouse, which I otherwise knew for putting out a rare live LP by Freakwater, another U.S. band melding old-time and new.) Guitarist and backing vocalist Tonya Lamm went on to join Tres Chicas with Caitlin Cary, who I also first discovered through her appearance (with Whiskeytown) on Straight Outta Boone County; lead vocalist Shawn Barton mostly dropped out of the music business; bassist Anne Tkach died tragically young in a house fire in 2015.

Until now, I hadn’t listened to Hazeldine in years, though they were absolutely formative to many of my musical tastes. For that matter, I also forgot about Madder Rose for a good couple of decades before they turned up at Dromfest this year. Musical taste, and taste in general, isn’t a progression, it’s a series of meanders and loops and eddies, and you never know when you’ll find yourself back upstream where you started, or where your course will end up leading you from there.