Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “One by One”

The Wilco Song Spotlight shines this time on “One by One,” one of my favorites from the band’s 1998 Mermaid Avenue collaboration with Billy Bragg. So let’s get right to it:

“One by One” (Woody Guthrie, Jeff Tweedy)

Jay Bennett: piano, organ

Ken Coomer: drums

Bob Egan: pedal steel

John Stirratt: electric bass

Jeff Tweedy: acoustic guitar, vocals

This heartbreaking lament offers a wizened take on a man’s fading mortality, but surprisingly the words were written by Guthrie in 1939, when he was only twenty-seven. Tweedy wrote the melody for the song in 1997 and polished it off with the Being There–era line-up of Wilco, when Bob Egan was still around, in late 1997 or early 1998.

The song fades in to a swirling wall of sound, in which Tweedy’s echoed vocal blends into the mix yet gives each word profound weight. “One by one,” the narrator’s “teardrops fall,” his “dreams fade,” and his “schemes fall fast away.”

On the popular radio show and podcast Sound Opinions, rock critic and Wilco biographer critic Greg Kot added this song to the ongoing feature The Desert Island Jukebox, noting, “The wonderful rhythm section on this song, the way Ken Coomer’s drums and John Stirratt’s bass surround Tweedy’s voice, is just remarkable. And Tweedy embodies Guthrie’s lyric ... it’s basically talking about a man who’s aging and seeing his life filter away, and looking back on missed opportunities and saying, I don’t have many more days left to get it right.”

Tweedy premiered the song at one of his many late-90s solo acoustic shows at the Lounge Ax, on March 26, 1998. He flavored the song with harmonica—an instrument he had just taken up during the Mermaid Avenue sessions in Dublin, Ireland. He would play it several more times at the venue on subsequent occasions, but sans harmonica.

Here's a stellar version of “One by One” from Wilco's 2005 live album Kicking Television:

After the song’s first airing elsewhere, at Park West in Chicago on September 13, 2000, he remarked, “Tough song—every line starts with ‘one by one’ - you need to really be on your toes.”

This is an edited excerpt of Wilcopedia by Daniel Cook Johnson, published by Jawbone Press (www.jawbonepress.com). Order your copy here.

More later...