Posts Tagged ‘Jeff Tweedy’

WILCO – ” Yankee Hotel Foxtrot ” Classic Albums (Deluxe Edition)

Posted: April 20, 2022 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Nonesuch Releases Special Editions of Wilco’s Iconic “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” on September 16th in Celebration of Album’s 20th Anniversary, Wilco’s fourth studio set saw the departure of guitarist Jay Bennett and drummer Ken Coomer – and famously prompted a break with the group’s record label – yet somehow triumph emerged from adversity. Picked up by Nonesuch, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” would become the Chicago-based alternative rock band’s most successful album. From opener “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” onward, the collection’s ambition is undeniable, with Sonic Youth stalwart Jim O’Rourke’s multi-layered mix applied to some of Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy’s most varied and distinctive songs. With its No1 ranking in the year’s on best-of-the-decade lists in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and Paste, critical acclaim for the gold-certified “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” So please give the set another spin to wish Jeff Tweedy a happy birthday.

Named in honour of the three-word codes used by short-wave radio operators, Wilco’s fourth album sounds like a late-night broadcast of some weirdly wonderful pop station punctuated by static and the sonic bleed of competing signals. Songs that begin with simple, elegiac grace—“Ashes of American Flags” and “Poor Places”—end in a cathartic squall of distortion. The results can be initially jarring, but it’s these tracks more than the sturdy jangle pop of “Kamera” or “Heavy Metal Drummer” that demand, and reward, repeated listens. Mixed by studio experimentalist Jim O’Rourke and produced by the band, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” harkens back to a time when the words “pop” and “sonic adventurism” weren’t mutually exclusive.

Great records don’t necessarily always have interesting stories behind them. There’s probably a compelling argument to say that Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” doesn’t need one – that regardless of context, it’s simply just an outstanding piece of work. In this instance, however, it’s difficult to separate the album from all of the noise surrounding it. These eleven songs on the original album represent so much more than just the sum of their parts. They stand for the existence (and complete vindication) of integrity and artistic freedom, in a world so often dominated by corporate structures and commercial pressures. Because if something can simultaneously feel like both an instant classic and a slow-burner, then surely this is it.

The backstory is something I’m sure a lot of readers will be aware of, so here goes a brief summary; having recorded the album, and with frontman Jeff Tweedy correctly believing it to be their best work to date, the band submit to their label Reprise records (a subsidiary of Warner) who following an internal shakeup refuse to release it on the grounds that it has no commercial potential. The band negotiate a costly split from Reprise, retaining the rights to the record which they then streamed on their website for free, a ground breaking move (and pretty unheard of at the time). Bizarrely, the band end up signing with Nonesuch records, another subsidiary of the same major label – a move that many critics believe exemplifies just how messed up the music industry is in modern times. The album goes on to amass a huge amount of critical acclaim, and just so happened to shift hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming a gold-selling LP in the process.

Nonesuch release seven special editions of Wilco’s landmark 2002 album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. The now-classic record has been remastered and will be available as part of each set. “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was the first Wilco release on Nonesuch Records following the band’s infamous split with Reprise (both labels are part of Warner Music Group). It was also the first release featuring the line-up of drummer Glenn Kotche and multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach joining founding members Jeff Tweedy and John Stirratt. The 2002 Sam Jones film “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” documented the fraught recording and mixing process, personnel changes, and label issues.

Given the legend that surrounds it, the remarkable part is probably that in the fifteen years since its release, the most enduring thing is the music itself. For me, there’s pretty much the whole spectrum of human emotion explored within a microcosm; at times, Tweedy’s abstractly poetic lyrics serve to cryptically mask what is actually quite a personal record while at other points, relationships and communicative failures lie at its heart. It’s the sending of signals in the hope that someone, somewhere will receive – audibly characterised in the broken static and shortwave radio samples that regularly weave in and out. There’s the playful denouncement of love in the opener ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’, but also the hopeful celebration of it by the time the album draws to a heart wrenching close, with Tweedy declaring: “I’ve got reservations about so many things / But not about you”, a chaotic and confused yet beautiful love letter for the modern era.

There’s a penetrating weight to it all, a sincerity which somehow never falls into over-earnestness. It is in many ways a record of constant tension – mostly between the beautiful and destructive – but also mirroring the ongoing conflicts outside the music; between bandmates (guitarist and co-writer Jay Bennett left the band shortly after the album’s completion), and between band and label, the tension between artistic freedom and commercial potential. At once both pretty and dissonant, conventional yet weird, both instant and challenging, it’s a record that rewards the listener with each spin, a phrase which always sounded to me like a useless cliché until I found it to be true. I think the thing I love most about “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” is that ultimately there’s just classic song writing and melody at its core, with Tweedy’s voice broken and exposed at the centre of everything, but with complete chaos ensuing all around it.

For me, Jay Bennett perfectly summarizes it with this quote from the documentary “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” – “If the overall song feels good to you, you’re going to fall in love with the little parts of it that are fucked up”. There are swirling organs, crashing drums, distant voices, and dissonant pianos, and in ‘Ashes Of American Flags’ and ‘Poor Places, anthemic moments that descend into walls of white noise and feedback. It comes to me as no surprise whatsoever that over time this is an album that has been repeatedly referenced as being “Americana’s Kid A”.

Wilco marked the anniversary of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” which was released commercially on April 23rd, 2002, after a circuitous and storied gestation, including a period of streaming for free on the band’s website—with a performance of the album’s “Poor Places” on last night’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which may be seen below. The band is currently performing “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” in its entirety (plus a mix of concert favorites and rarities) in two limited runs at New York City’s United Palace and Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. 

Among Yankee’s inspirations was a recording Tweedy bought at Tower Records in the late 1990s, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. As Bob Mehr points out in his new album note, the record got “deep under Tweedy’s skin.” Tweedy said in his 2017 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), “It was as fascinating to me as anything being made by actual musicians using actual instruments … I wanted to know why it was so hypnotic to me. Why could I listen to hours of this stuff, even though I had no clue what any of them were saying. That question became the foundation for “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” … the way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate.” The album takes its title from a haunting recording of a woman repeating those words that is included in The Conet Project; that recording is sampled in the penultimate song on “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, “Poor Places.”

The film gives a great insight into the recording process. Tweedy notes they “generally go for a pretty straight definitive version of what the song sounds like it should be…and then deconstruct it a little bit and see if there’s some more exciting way to approach it”. I adore this as a concept – the fact that what is theirs to have created is also theirs to destroy, and that a song can take any number of routes before it becomes the one that people hear. Ultimately, I think what probably sets the results apart is the combination of the band’s willingness to experimentally rip up the Americana rulebook, but crucially also the mixing work of Jim O’Rourke (Sonic Youth), whose mixes lift them far beyond the Alt-Country genre they had practically created in the first place. At the heart these are gorgeously simple songs, reimagined in an exciting, experimental vision.

Retrospectively, quite how many people these songs have resonated with may have come as some surprise to Wilco’s former label bosses, but not to me. For a record that very nearly didn’t see the light of day, that it exists at all is truly wonderful, and that it exists without compromise is nothing short of remarkable. Maybe some things are worth waiting for.

Wilco was Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Leroy Bach, Glenn Kotche, and Jay Bennett with Craig Christiansen, Ken Coomer, Jessy Greene, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Jim O’Rourke.

11LP – The Super Deluxe version comprises eleven vinyl LPs and one CD – including demos, drafts, and instrumentals, charting the making of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” – plus a live 2002 concert recording and a September 2001 radio performance and interview. That box set includes eighty-two previously unreleased music tracks as well as a new book featuring an interview with singer/songwriter/guitarist Jeff Tweedy, drummer Glenn Kotche, and Jim O’Rourke, who mixed the acclaimed 2002 album; an in-depth essay by journalist/author Bob Mehr; and previously unseen photos of the band making the album in their Chicago studio, The Loft.

7LP – Deluxe edition comes in a sturdy box with soft cover book. The set includes the original album, remastered, plus 39 previously unreleased tracks—“The Unified Theory of Everything” alternate album versions plus bonus tracks, a live 2002 concert recording, and a September 2001 radio performance. The set also includes a booklet with an in-depth essay by journalist / author Bob Mehr.

2CD – Expanded Edition includes the original album, remastered, plus 18 previously unreleased tracks—“The Unified Theory of Everything” alternate album versions plus bonus tracks.

8CD – Super Deluxe Edition comprises the original album, remastered for its 20th anniversary in 2022, plus 82 previously unreleased tracks. Includes demos, drafts, and instrumentals, charting the making of the album; a live 2002 concert recording; and a September 2001 radio performance and interview. The set also includes a new book featuring an interview with Jeff Tweedy, Glenn Kotche, and Jim O’Rourke; an in-depth essay by journalist/author Bob Mehr; and previously unseen photos of the band making the album in their Chicago studio.

A live version of “Reservations” from a legendary concert contained on Snoozin’ at The Pageant – Live 7/23/02 at The Pageant, St. Louis, MO—a recording that is part of the Super Deluxe LP and CD sets as well as the Deluxe LP and digital sets—is available now. Full details of each of the seven versions is below; album pre-orders are available here. A limited-edition vinyl 7” with versions of “I’m the Man Who Loves You” and “War on War,” from the Super Deluxe box set, is available now from wilcostore.com.

“After half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco’s aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties… Beneath the great story of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot“, there are all the tropes and symbols and coincidences of a little mythology; but under that is a fantastic rock record. And why tell you? You all already knew this.”

thanks to DIS,

WILCO – ” A Ghost Is Born “

Posted: April 15, 2022 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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There is nothing quite like A Ghost Is Born in Wilco’s discography. Ghost (even more than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which has been roundly embraced as a masterpiece) is the difficult album. There’s a steady hum of dread and anxiety buzzing beneath these tracks. It rises to the surface on the Krautrock workout “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” and on “Less Than You Think,” a lengthy ambient drone meant to simulate Jeff Tweedy’s debilitating migraines. But “Less” aside, this isn’t exactly Metal Machine Music; Tweedy’s songwriting is generous and urgent, even—or especially—in the face of his personal battles with anxiety and depression. “Hummingbird” is perfect McCartney pop, “Handshake Drugs” is a cryptic snapshot of the singer’s addiction to painkillers and “At Least That’s What You Said”—a haunted murmur of a love song that erupts in a remarkable guitar tantrum—might just be Wilco’s finest song ever. Wilco’s art-rock period ended soon after A Ghost Is Born. Twelve years later, it remains one of the band’s most puzzling and rewarding creations.

“A Ghost Is Born” sits neatly in the middle of Wilco’s ten studio albums. As the band’s centre, the record is their turning point and their most exploratory.

The first two minutes of “At Least That’s What You Said” is raw emotion. It’s one hell of an album opener. Until that two minute mark where everything is ripped to shreds and Tweedy comes in on electric guitar with one of the best riffs of his career. It’s on “Ghost” where Tweedy is prominently on the guitar for the entire record, the only time that’s happened on Wilco’s LPs. He used the guitar to translate something impossible to hold: pain.

There are many side stories of the Wilco arc including—but not limited to—record labels and disgruntled band members. The most important concerning “A Ghost Is Born” is headaches. Tweedy has been plagued by chronic migraines his whole life, vomiting and all. The month before Ghost’s release he checked into a clinic for migraines, depression, and anxiety attacks. It put off a tour, where the band was playing a lot of the record before it came out. Soon after, he became addicted to the painkillers prescribed to him. Tweedy then checked into rehab, one that would treat addiction and depression after realizing he couldn’t fight one battle without facing the other.

He wanted to push his headaches and panic attacks out through six strings. “A Ghost Is Born” is a sweeping landscape of Jeff Tweedy’s guitar and therefore, of his head. In this context “At Least That’s What You Said” is crisp and anything but concise. When the piano and drums come in and pound together, it’s a pulse. “A Ghost Is Born” is often building up to break us back down. The lyrics are a whimper and the melody a rage. For someone with so much pain and confusion, it’s amazing he’s able to find beauty in it. To take it one step further and share that beauty is nearly fantastical.

Tweedy is an unstoppable musician on this record. I find myself reminding fellow Wilco fans of Tweedy’s guitar work, of his genius with the instrument, and the power and dexterity he can deliver. Resident jazz rock guitarist Nels Cline joined the band in 2004 but doesn’t appear until 2007’s “Sky Blue Sky”. “A Ghost Is Born” is all Tweedy.

There are new members who joined up for “Ghost”. Keyboard player Mikael Jorgensen, formerly Wilco’s sound engineer, is here and shares some song writing credits with Tweedy. Jorgensen formally introduces himself on track two, “Hell Is Chrome,” with a bright opening riff on the piano. Keyboards have always been an important part of Wilco, but on “Ghost “they expand alongside Tweedy’s guitar forming cacophonous riffs. Jorgensen also plays rocksichord, organ, synthesizer, and a Farfisa (an electric organ) on the LP, bringing new textures to play with.  

Tweedy entered rehab for an addiction to painkillers just two weeks before the release of “Ghost”, the band’s fifth studio album, and when he came back sobre it was too late to delete the 12 minutes of gray noise that close the LP. The album’s theme of self-identity was manifested by more significant band contributions. Also because this was the album between the dismissal of Jay Bennett and the addition of Nels Cline, Tweedy played most of the lead guitar and leaned heavily on Television records (and a lesson from Richard Lloyd) for guidance. Ironically, this organic-sounding LP was pieced together through Pro Tools software, but Tweedy came in armed with a great batch of songs.

Happy 15th Anniversary to Wilco’s fifth studio album “A Ghost Is Born”, originally released June 22nd, 2004.

JEFF TWEEDY – ” Love Is The King “

Posted: December 3, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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During the enforced idleness of the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people hatched ambitious plans: reading unreadable books, mastering a language, baking virtuous sourdough. For Jeff Tweedy, the global crisis truncated a Wilco tour, and he found himself at home with his family. His son Spencer lives at home anyway, and his other son, Sammy, returned from New York to do remote schooling.

Tweedy had tuned in to the discussion about creativity during times of quarantine, and had learned (the arguable fact) that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while sheltering from the plague. What to do? Well, in times of stress, as in all times, Tweedy’s habit is to visit his Chicago studio, The Loft. There, he planned to write a country album named after Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, producing a song a day.

“Love Is The King” is not that record. Tantalisingly, Tweedy suggests that a number of straightforward country-style songs were recorded before his own instincts started to kick in. True, if Shakespeare had gone countrypolitan, he might have taken his sense of jeopardy, his troubled masculinity, his interest in tempests as an emotional metaphor and created something similar. “Ripeness is all,” says Edgar in King Lear. “Oh, tomatoes right off the vine,” croons Tweedy in “Guess Again”, “we used to eat them like that all the time.”

This album marries Tweedy’s mature emotional outlook (love is all, and is a dream worth dreaming) to the workaday manners of Uncle Tupelo or the Woody Guthrie project, Mermaid Avenue. There’s a home video lurking on YouTube of Tweedy sitting on his sofa, strumming his way through Talking Heads’ “Heaven”. The sound of Love Is The King is what you’d expect from the bar band in that song: briskly functional, with an enduring tension between Tweedy’s balmy vocals and the electric guitar, which arrives in these songs like a deluge.

“I always think that the electric guitar player, who’s me, is the guy who’s having the toughest time dealing with everything,” Tweedy tells says. “He’s a little bit frayed. He showed up for a different type of session, his nerves are getting the better of him.”

Occasionally, broader influences seep through. The playful “Gwendolyn” has the wayward electricity of the Faces, and a heroine who sounds the sort of paramour the young Rod Stewart might have conquered and regretted. For Tweedy it acknowledges his habit of finding himself several steps behind a woman, emotionally. The title track has a languid rhythm that is almost obliterated by the guitar, and a lyric that marries the Lear-like outlook of the narrator (“At the edge/Of as bad as it gets”), to flashes of current affairs; tanks in the streets and violence.

That mood spills into “Opaline”, a honky-tonk lament that playfully blurs images of death, paranoia and dread. The inspiration for the song is more prosaic. The lyric is addressed to a golden orb-weaver spider that lived in Tweedy’s backyard through spring and summer before abruptly disappearing, presumed dead. The song’s most troubling image, of a hearse stuck at a toll gate, actually happened. Tweedy saw the funeral car, parked in its own metaphor, when escaping Chicago via the skyway to Michigan. “I kept looking in my rear-view mirror, thinking, ‘Holy shit, that’s one of the worst things I can think of,’” he says with a laugh. “A guy driving a hearse with no change for a toll.”

On paper, it sounds tormented. In reality, it doesn’t. As a singer, Tweedy patrols the trunk road between regret and resilience. Straight-legged sincerity, when he chooses to use it, is a good look: see the thankful love song “Even I Can See”. Tweedy is probably more instinctively comfortable undermining himself, as on the countrified “Natural Disaster”. That song’s image of “a lightning bolt punch a bird right out of the sky” may be a nod to the sudden death of a flamingo in Charles Portis’s book The Dog Of The South. On a further literary note, Tweedy’s pal, author George Saunders, provides a couple of lines to the sprightly “A Robin Or A Wren”, a song that manages to roll together romantic devotion, love of life, fear of death, and a playful suggestion of reincarnation. Saunders’ lines are about “the end of the end of this beautiful dream”. 

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Tweedy, with his unerring ability to find himself while getting lost, ushers in a conclusion that is happy and sad, with hope kept aflame by his faith in the power of song. No matter what he does with Wilco or solo, simply one of the best songwriters alive. His lyrics are poetry. His vocal delivery invites you in and is so vulnerable. I like this a bit better than Warm, which was also brilliant. This is just another in a string of albums from artists over the pandemic that have blown me away this year.

Released October 23rd, 2020

All songs written by Jeff Tweedy
except “A Robin Or A Wren” written by Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders
Performed by Jeff Tweedy, Spencer Tweedy, and Sammy Tweedy,

JEFF TWEEDY – ” Love Is The King “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in MUSIC
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4 litk clear vinyl

It was inside Jeff Tweedy’s second home, The Loft in Chicago, that “Love Is The King” was recorded in April of 2020. Surrounded by an assemblage of treasured instruments and loved ones in a world that felt more and more alien by the day. “Guess Again” is the first single from Jeff Tweedy’s forthcoming album, Tweedy recorded Love Is the King in April at the Loft in Chicago, working with his sons Spencer and Sammy. The album marks his fourth solo album in as many years,

Out on dBpm Records, “Love Is The King“, a “beautifully honest ode to love and hope,” is the follow-up to 2018’s Warm and 2019’s Warmer, and comes on the heels of Tweedy’s second book, How To Write One Song, via Penguin Random House’s Dutton. “At the beginning of the lockdown I started writing country songs to console myself. Folk and country type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting way. Guess Again is a good example of the success I was having at pushing the world away, counting my blessings — taking stock in my good fortune to have love in my life,” comments Tweedy.

“Gwendolyn” is the third single from Jeff Tweedy’s forthcoming album Love Is The King.

The album will be released ten days after Tweedy’s second book ‘How To Write One Song’, which is published on Faber Social on October 13th. It follows his 2018 memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).

“The feeling I get when I write – the sense that time is simultaneously expanding and disappearing – that I’m simultaneously more me and also free of me – is the main reason I wanted to put my thoughts on song-writing down in book form to share with everyone so inclined,” the singer said in a statement.

“A few weeks later things began to sound like Love Is The King — a little more frayed around the edges with a lot more fear creeping in. Still hopeful but definitely discovering the limits of my own ability to self soothe.” –Jeff Tweedy.

Label dBpm Records Released 15/01/21

JEFF TWEEDY – ” Love Is The King “

Posted: September 16, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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On Tuesday, Jeff Tweedy announced the release of his fourth solo record, Love Is The King, due out on October 23rd via dPm Records. The album serves as the follow up to 2018’s WARM and 2019’s WARMER, and sees the release of two lead singles today, “Guess Again” and the title track.

The release of the album will come on the heels of Tweedy’s second book, How To Write One Song, out October 13th via Penguin Random House. Tweedy will also perform on September 18th in a drive-in concert at the McHenry Outdoor Theater in McHenry, IL. For those who cannot attend the sold-out event, the Wilco frontman will also livestream the concert. Back to the present… Jeff’s announced a new book AND a new album. You might be thinking, “Where does he get all this energy?”. The answer: he’s a self-proclaimed nap enthusiast.

The book’s called How To Write One Song and it will teach you how to do just that. But at its core it’s a how-to guide on creativity and how to stay motivated. How To Write One Song hits bookshelves on October 13th . Preorder US | UK | AUS and you can get a free digital download from Jeff.

A week later (Oct. 23), you’ll hear Jeff’s third solo album, “Love Is The King” – 11 new songs written since touring came to a halt in March. Jeff went to The Loft with his sons, Spencer and Sammy, and came out with a “beautifully honest ode to love and hope” .

Love Is The King was composed by Tweedy, alongside his sons Sammy and Spencer, during the COVID-19 lockdown. Recorded in April 2020, just after Wilco was forced to abandon its North American tour, the song writing process originally began as a challenge where Tweedy tested himself to write a song everyday until he had a whole album.

“At the beginning of the lockdown I started writing country songs to console myself. Folk and country type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting way. ‘Guess Again’ is a good example of the success I was having at pushing the world away, counting my blessings — taking stock in my good fortune to have love in my life,” Tweedy said in a press release. “A few weeks later things began to sound like ‘Love Is The King’ — a little more frayed around the edges with a lot more fear creeping in. Still hopeful but definitely discovering the limits of my own ability to self soothe.”

The album’s title track, “Love Is The King”, finds just that mix of melancholy folk song-writing that Tweedy has perfected over several decades. With his dreamy, far-away vocals and simple fingerpicking, “Love Is The King” is relatable to anyone who went through the lockdown process what feels like a lifetime ago. As for “Guess Again”, the song finds a bit more cheerful melody with percussive accompaniment to Tweedy’s acoustic guitar. The lyrics also present a brighter reality that shows, even though things are bleak now, that hope still shines through the love of another.

“Love Is The King” and “Guess Again” from Jeff Tweedy’s forthcoming album, Love Is The King, due out on October 23rd.

WILCO – ” Impossible Germany ” Live on KCRW

Posted: September 12, 2020 in MUSIC
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Speaking of a throwback, you may have heard: We’re giving “Summerteeth” a deluxe makeover. The new package shines inside and out.

It’s got more than 40 bonus tracks including demos, alternate takes on the Summerteeth classics and live performances. These boxsets reimagine the original artwork in a metallic finish and include fresh liner notes drawn from recent conversations with Jeff and John. You’re gonna want this one in your collection, trust us.

Preorder it here and you can expect it on your doorstep November. 6th. Meanwhile; Wilco’s illustrious career hit a milestone in 2016, with the release of their 10th studio album “Schmilco.” They packed smaller venues during a fall tour to celebrate, including a run at The Theatre at Ace Hotel. We captured a private performance — stage set and all — at the Theatre, and it showcases a band at the peak of their powers. Rewatch this career-spanning set.

In the midst of three sold out shows in LA, Wilco set aside an afternoon to record a special live session for KCRW at The Theatre at Ace Hotel.

Wilco’s illustrious career hit a milestone in 2016, with the release of their 10th studio album “Schmilco.” They packed smaller venues during a fall tour to celebrate, including a run at The Theatre at Ace Hotel. We captured a private performance — stage set and all — at the Theatre, and it showcases a band at the peak of their powers.

Re-watch this career-spanning set.

Set List: 0:00 If I Ever Was a Child 2:53 Cry All Day 7:12 The Joke Explained 9:45 Someone to Lose 12:55 Dawned On Me 16:27 Impossible Germany 23:25 We Aren’t The World (Safety Girl) 26:04 The Late Greats

WILCO – ” Summerteeth ” 5 LP Box Set

Posted: September 3, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Summerteeth deluxejpg

Wilco’s third album “Summerteeth” is Rhino Record’s latest offering in 2020’s holiday box set season. A 4CD and 5LP edition of the 1999 release, packed with unreleased material, will be issued November 6th.

Wilco have announced that their third LP, 1999’s Summerteeth, will be receiving the Deluxe Edition treatment, set for a November. 6th release. The updated and expanded edition will come in a four-CD or five-LP set.

The four-CD version included a remastered version of the original album and “an entire disc of unreleased studio outtakes, alternate versions and demos that chart the making of the album from song writing demos to alternate studio arrangements to finished masters.” (Quote via press release.) The remaining two discs will be dedicated to a never-before-released live show: “The concert took place late in the Summerteeth tour, on November 1st, 1999 in Colorado at The Boulder Theatre, when the new songs had been road-tested and the band was in top form. Sourced from an uncirculated soundboard recording, it features band members Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Ken Coomer and Jay Bennett.” (Press release.)

The 5-LP vinyl version will not include the Colorado show; instead, it will feature “a special, exclusive performance from early 1999 titled ‘An Unmitigated Disaster,’ a previously unreleased live in-store performance at Tower Records on March 11th, 1999, just two days after the album was released.” (Quote via press release.) The show will only be available in the LP set.

Both physical and digital formats feature a brand-new remaster of the original album by Bob Ludwig, plus two dozen previously unreleased demos, outtakes and alternate versions. Each set features an unreleased live show as well: the CD featuring an extended, soundboard-sourced set at Colorado’s Boulder Theatre recorded on November 1st, 1999 (well into the band’s tour to promote the album), while the LP includes a Tower Records gig in Chicago the week of Summerteeth‘s release, broadcast on radio station WXRT-FM and labeled here as An Unmitigated Disaster. A “Slow Rhodes Version” of the title track, included on the outtakes set,

Recorded through 1997 and 1998 in Willie Nelson’s Texas recording studio and Chicago’s Kingsize Soundlabs – during which, separately, Wilco recorded and released Mermaid Avenue with Billy Bragg, consisting of unused Woody Guthrie lyrics – the follow-up to 1996’s Being There was markedly different from anything Wilco had ever released. Most of the tunes were written by Jeff Tweedy and company in the studio, and for the first time, the band achieved their desired sound with overdubs. While Summerteeth didn’t outsell Being There, it was critically lauded, making No. 8 on the Village Voice‘s annual Pazz & Jop poll that year.

The deluxe Summerteeth features revisited cover artwork with metallic foil packaging by the band’s Grammy-winning art director Lawrence Azerrad. The band’s official store will also sell a limited colour-vinyl edition of the LP box, topping out at 2000 copies. (The general vinyl box will also be limited to 6500 copies.)

Summerteeth Reissue

UNCLE TUPELO – ” No Depression ” 30th Anniversary Released June 21st, 1990

Posted: June 27, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Over the last few decades, it’s becoming increasingly harder to talk about the life and legacy of Uncle Tupelo without the conversation falling down one of the many rabbit holes of the band’s ever-expanding mythos.

By now, most everyone knows the more substantial high points of the band’s dynamic yet short-lived arc. Founding members Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and Mike Heidorn started playing together in high school in a mid-’80s Belleville, Illinois, band called The Primitives that eventually became Uncle Tupelo after their lead singer (Farrar’s brother, Wade) quit the band and headed to college. The trio played heavily around Illinois and Missouri (especially at St. Louis staples Cicero’s and Mississippi Nights), eventually got an indie label record deal, released three celebrated albums, expanded to a five-piece, got picked up by a major label, released their fourth album, and subsequently imploded due to the mounting creative differences and personal tensions between co-frontmen Farrar and Tweedy. In the aftermath of Uncle Tupelo’s breakup, both artists went on to form the highly influential (and still going strong) bands Son Volt and Wilco, while their original work with Uncle Tupelo has garnered the legacy of being —depending on whom you ask — either just one of a number of genre pioneers that carried forward older music to younger generations or the standalone patient zero for the entire alt-country/Americana/modern roots music movement.

However, on this occasion, the 30th anniversary of Uncle Tupelo’s debut album, No Depression (released June 21st, 1990, on Rockville Records), there will be no attempts at encapsulating all of the “which came first, the genre or the band” equivocations. Instead, we decided to mark the milestone with some specificity, foregoing the conventional family tree retrospective in favour of a reflection on what is arguably one of the most shadow-casting records of the 20th century. To do so, we went directly to the source, speaking with Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy to get their insights and recollections on three decades of their career-starting (if not career-defining) debut release.

“Has it only been 30 years?” laughs Tweedy, a little stunned, a little tongue-in-cheek. “Like most important events, it somehow simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago and also … boy, that went fast!” Perhaps underscoring the “opposites attract” theme that is at the most foundational level of their complexly layered relationship, Farrar’s reaction to the anniversary is delivered with a bit more middle-of-the-road measuredness: “Honestly, some time has passed but it doesn’t really feel like it’s been that long. It’s just gratifying that anyone wants to talk about what we did 30 years ago.”

While that last comment might elicit a chuckle from anyone familiar with the everlasting supply of appreciative wistfulness and heated debates that has surrounded the individual and collective impacts of Farrar and Tweedy within the roots music community, there is a point to be made about the “subject to change” legacies of landmark albums and the fickle nature of pop cultural attention spans. There will always be a certain element of musical fandom that is asking “What’s next?”, while another, competing thread is turning the conversation from present-day movements back to the music that came before them. In the case of Uncle Tupelo, and especially their No Depression album, the attempt to address both can be found in their unconventional hybrid of self-penned song writing and encyclopedically referential musical influences that were blended together in ways that allowed the band to function as both creators and conduits.

“We didn’t come up with that whole ‘Woody Guthrie meets Hüsker Dü’ thing. That was probably some publicist along the way,” Farrar says. “Although, it wasn’t that far off. We were fans of Hüsker Dü and certainly there were musical similarities. Lyrically, from Woody Guthrie and essentially Bob Dylan too, we were inspired to think about societal issues and what was going on around us. So, we just put all those things into our songs.” Prime examples of this amalgam can be found on No Depression tracks like “Graveyard Shift,” “Factory Belt,” “Outdone,” and “Train,” where the band mixes the growling guitars and aggressive start-stop rhythms of their punk and indie rock influences with the country and folk-influenced lyrical themes of working-class desperation, economic struggle, anti-war sentiments, down-and-out isolation, and alcohol-soaked small-town blues.

“There were lots of bands — X, The Knitters, Jason and the Scorchers, Green on Red, so many more — already kind of fusing these two worlds that we were straddling,” says Tweedy. “I think our approach to it might have been a little bit more isolated and unrefined. Maybe it came out more punk rock or something, but I think anybody that credits us with inventing anything is wrong.” To further make the point, Tweedy points to the genre-blurring activities of some of his favourite ’60s bands: “We thought there was something boldly punk rock about The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Rolling Stones. To us,

Shortly after inking a record deal with Rockville Records in late 1989, Uncle Tupelo kicked off 1990 by traveling to Boston in the dead of winter to record their debut album at Fort Apache recording studio with famed alternative/college rock producers Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie. At the time, the celebrated production duo had already amassed an impressive recording resume that included Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Throwing Muses, Blake Babies, and more. (After recording No Depression, Slade and Kolderie would go on to produce Uncle Tupelo’s second record, Still Feel Gone, as well as multiplatinum albums for Radiohead, Hole, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and others).

“Of all the records that Paul and Sean had worked on to that point, I think the Dinosaur Jr. stuff would probably have been the biggest persuader for us,” admits Tweedy. “Being a production team that had worked on records that we actually owned, I think we were really surprised that they would want to work with us. I remember running through the first take of whatever we tried to do on the first day in the studio and Paul coming out and saying ‘Oh, good. You guys can play.’ I don’t think anybody had ever said that to us before.”

“As soon as we met Sean and Paul, there was such a good working camaraderie between us,” Farrar says. “They helped us get some really good guitar sounds and helped us flesh things out in terms of the finished recording being more than just doing what we normally did live. We were blown away when they brought in Rich Gilbert to play pedal steel on ‘Whiskey Bottle’ because that was an instrument that we hadn’t had the opportunity to record with before. He’s also playing that apocalyptic noise part at the end of ‘Factory Belt’ — just doing sweeps up and down the pedal steel with his slide.”

When it came time to package their newly recorded songs into a proper album, the band once again chose to wear its influences on its sleeve. Not only did they create a minimalist album cover aesthetic that mimicked releases from Moe Asch’s midcentury Folkways Records catalogue, but they also titled the album No Depression after the traditional Depression-era folksong “No Depression in Heaven” that is often attributed to the legendary Carter Family. (While they were the first to record it, there is some speculation that A.P. Carter “found” the song more than “wrote” it himself). Uncle Tupelo had also recorded a cover of the song for the album, surprising many by foregoing the buzzier, bombastic side of their sound for a more true-to-form acoustic folk number. The folksy, back porch singalong vibe can also be found on No Depression tracks “Life Worth Livin’” and “Screen Door,” with Farrar adding mandolin to the former and Tweedy swapping out his bass for an acoustic guitar on the latter.

When asked where they got the idea to cover “No Depression,” both Farrar and Tweedy tell the same origin story and make the same point of clarification. Remembers Farrar, “I was digging through my mom’s record collection and found this old folk compilation that had ‘No Depression’ on it. I thought the song really resonated with the themes of Midwest isolation that we often explored, plus it passed the test with Jeff and Mike since it sounded like something Woody Guthrie would’ve done. Though, I should add this was the New Lost City Ramblers version.”

Tweedy gives a similar account, adding, “We really owe a debt to the first folk revival wave from the late ’50s, early ’60s. Years later, I actually got to thank John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers for that when we crossed paths at Newport for this Harry Smith anthology reissue benefit show that Wilco played.”

Since the release of No Depression, both Farrar and Tweedy have each built impressive catalogues of releases between their respective bands and solo albums. Both are also still extremely active in the scene they helped to shape; just last year, Son Volt released Union, Wilco released Ode to Joy, and Tweedy released his second solo album, Warmer. However, there’s a good chance that neither artist will ever fully outstep the larger shadow of what they created together on No Depression. This seems true for both their live shows — “‘Graveyard Shift’ is one that’s been requested a lot over the years,” says Farrar; while Tweedy admits “‘Screen Door’ still gets requested quite frequently when I play solo shows, and although I’m not a big fan of the song, I’m also pretty sanguine about the notion of something surviving that long” — as well as for how the album seems to be a template by which all of their other works are somehow measured in various ways.

In fact, that “long time” Tweedy references might’ve been the majority, if not entirety, of Uncle Tupelo’s run; as the band’s highest accolades and genre pioneering respects only started popping up in the wake of their breakup in May 1994. As Uncle Tupelo drummer Mike Heidorn told the Los Angeles Times in early 1996 (at the time, he was playing drums in Farrar’s new band, Son Volt), “Uncle Tupelo is bigger now than ever… I guess death is a great career move.” These days, Farrar expresses some of the same sentiments on that post-mortem timeline: “It must’ve started to some degree around late ’94 or so when we had this vague understanding of an online chat group that had been built around mutual fans of the band.

Both Farrar and Tweedy acknowledge they haven’t sat with No Depression, the album, in quite some time, with the latter even stating, “It’s hard for me to really embrace the first record because I don’t think I had found my voice yet.” However, they both seem to take a mutual sense of pride in the hand-me-down musical ambassadorship inherent in their earliest work’s legacy. Reflects Tweedy, “In hindsight, it’s a thrilling thing to feel that you got to be a part of the actual tradition of sharing this particular knowledge with people that might not have come to it as quickly or maybe would have not even been introduced to it at all.”

In the case of Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression turning 30 years old, Tweedy seems to get the most impassioned when thinking back on not what they were making at the time, but what they were learning — both about themselves and also about the world around them.

“I just remember this overwhelming feeling that Jay and I would talk about getting from listening to folk music and country music, and speaking for myself personally, it was like having the veil pulled back and realizing that the world has always been weird. The world has always been scary. So, when people choose to express themselves with music, it can also be completely untamed. It’s not always shaped by fashion or commercial viability or anything like that; people just want to express themselves with words and noise and sound. That’s what I think we were discovering in Uncle Tupelo.

WILCO – ” Tell Your Friends ” The Late Show

Posted: May 21, 2020 in MUSIC
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Tonight Wilco released a brand new song entitled “Tell Your Friends” after frontman Jeff Tweedy performed a lovely performance of “Jesus, Etc.” for Colbert. The new track definitely captures the spirit of present times and has a smooth chill vibe to it that could’ve fit on their most recent album, Ode To Joy. “Tell Your Friends” is currently available to stream on their Bandcamp, with all proceeds being donated to World Central Kitchen.

Last Wednesday night, Wilco performed their uplifting new single “Tell Your Friends” for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and then also shared a studio version of the song, which encourages us all to connect with family while under quarantine. The purchases of the song, which is exclusively on Bandcamp, will go to World Central Kitchen, an organization who provides meals in the wake of natural disasters.

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The performance showed each band member in their respective homes. Alongside friends and family, Tweedy sings: “Don’t forget to tell your friends/When you see them again/O’ I love you/O’ I love you.”

This a song for everyone, Tweedy said in a press release. “We miss each other. So we wrote a song about it to sing with each other, to sing to each other.”

Tell Your Friends by Wilco ! Our friends in Wilco graciously chose The Late Show as the place for their debut performance of “Tell Your Friends,” which is available for download at http://www.wilcohq.bandcamp.com. All proceeds will be donated to World Central Kitchen

UNCLE TUPELO – ” Anodyne Uncle ” Vinyl Reissue

Posted: January 18, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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When Americana pioneers Uncle Tupelo released their major-label debut, “Anodyne” on October 5th, 1993, it should have been the beginning of something big. They were following up their left-turn acoustic record, March 16-20, 1992, recorded with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, with their best record yet

Recorded live in the studio amid mounting tension between singer / songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, “Anodyne” proved to be Uncle Tupelo’s last and finest album. These final sessions find Farrar and Tweedy crafting a seamless mesh of country, folk and rock that both encompasses and exceeds the range of previous albums.

Anodyne smoothed the jarring, start-stop rhythms of the band’s first two records, No Depression and Still Feel Gone, into a straight-ahead steamroll behind new drummer Ken Coomer. Farrar’s barbed guitar riffs sear on “Chickamauga,” where he compares a crumbling relationship to a Civil War bloodbath. Quieter moments such as the title track flex the strength of new multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston, who played dobro, banjo and fiddle, and former guitar tech John Stirratt, who held down bass when Tweedy switched to guitar.

With the straight-up country of Acuff-rose (a tribute to the famed songwriting duo), and the folky New Madrid, Tupelo displays the traditional leanings found on March 16-20, 1992, while both the bass-heavy The Long Cut and the barnstorming Chickamauga broaden the punk-tinged sound of No Depression and Still Feel Gone. While Anodyne also features a raucous collaboration with the late Doug Sahm on Give Back the Key to My Heart, its most transcendent moments are the world-weary Slate and the sublime title track, one of the most beautifully bittersweet songs penned since Neil Young’s Helpless. Although anodyne proved to be the end of the line for Uncle Tupelo, it opened up more expansive roads for Farrar and Tweedy,

Eventually, the friction between lifelong friends Farrar and Tweedy brought down the band at their biggest moment. Tweedy rushed the remaining members of Uncle Tupelo into the studio to record Wilco’s 1995 debut A.M., while Farrar took the long cut and found success with the hit single “Drown” on Son Volt’s Trace a year later.

Farrar has continued to wrestle with obscure, early country and folk music and his textured guitar wranglings over eight solid albums. Wilco has evolved from a Tupelo-twin to an engine of reinvention, from the deconstructionist country-rock of 1996’s Being There to the shimmering heartbreak of 1999’s Summerteeth and 2001’s experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

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