Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “What Light”

This week, the Spotlight shines on a track from Wilco’s  from their sixth studio album, Sky Blue Sky (2007). 

“What Light” (Jeff Tweedy)

Jeff Tweedy: vocals, acoustic twelve-string
John Stirratt: background vocals, bass
Glenn Kotche: drums, percussion
Mikael Jorgensen: Hammond A100 organ
Nels Cline: electric guitar, lap steel
Pat Sansone: background vocals, piano
Jim O’Rourke: acoustic guitar

This uplifting folk song has a 70s-style you can do anything you want to do vibe, with lyrics that recall Cat Steven’s “If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out,” with Tweedy encouraging his listeners to ‘sing what you feel / Don’t let anyone say it’s wrong.” 

Labeled a “hippie-gospel hymn” by Rob Sheffield in his review for Rolling Stone, “What Light” was made available as a free download on wilcoworld.net in March 2007, two months before the album’s release, although many fans had first heard the song when it was premiered at Wilco and Tweedy solo shows in the summer of 2006.

After its release on Sky Blue Sky, a version of “What Light” from Wilco’s appearance on the NPR program World Café on June 15, 2007, was released on the 2008 compilation Live at the World Cafe: Volume 26 (Marathon). In 2014, this rendition was re-released on the box set Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014.

As for the reviews, Billboard’s Jonathan Cohen said that “the strummy first single, ‘What Light,’ sounds airlifted from Mermaid Avenue,” Paste Magazine’s Geoffrey Himes suggested that “The strum-along rhythm and nasal bray of ‘What Light’ resembles an early Dylan folk song,” and tinymixtapes.com’s Chad Wicked, making a similar comparison, opined that “‘What Light’ speaks and sounds like a modest anthem of goodness and wholesomeness, much like Dylan’s ‘Forever Young.’” 

Maybe the best summing up of “What Light” came from Joan Anderman in her review of Sky Blue Sky for the Boston Globe: “Tweedy isn’t finished with this life - ‘There’s a light, what light, inside of you,’ he sings over and over again in ‘What Light,’ a sweet, harmony-drenched celebration. The message is hardly revolutionary but endlessly relevant. It requires courage and candor - and if you’re a rock band, no small amount of creativity - to be yourself.”

With only thirty-something subsequent live airings, however, “What Light” is one of the least-performed songs on Sky Blue Sky. Since being played around two dozen times in 2006-07, it has only been played once or twice a tour. But as a relentlessly upbeat folk anthem, it’ll surely continue to make once-in-a-blue-moon appearances. *

* The most recent performance of “What Light” was on Episode 21 of The Tweedy Show, the Tweedy family’s live Instagram show which aired on April 10th of this year. You can watch it here.

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

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Watch Wilco perform on last night’s The Late Show

Wilco appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night to perform two songs: the brand new “Tell Your Friends” (featured in this week’s Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight), and “Jesus, Etc.” 

The band came together via separate livestreams which featured leader Jeff Tweedy and his sons Spencer and Sammy; John Stirratt, and his daughter Telula; Nels Cline and his wife Yuka Honda (and their dog); Glenn Kotche, his wife Miiri, and their kids; Pat Sansone, and Mikael Jorgensen, his wife Cassandra C. Jones, and their kids.

Check it out:

Following that, Tweedy played a superb solo acoustic version of one of his best songs:

As I reported yesterday, “Tell Your Friends” is available for immediate download with a charitable contribution.

Donations will go directly to World Central Kitchen, an organization working across America to safely distribute fresh meals in communities that need support.

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Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “Tell Your Friends”

This time, the Spotlight shines on Wilco’s latest release, “Tell Your Friends,” which made its debut on the Minnesota Public Radio program, Live From Here With Chris Thile, on May 16th.

The plodding yet dreamy dirge, which would’ve fit right in on the band’s last album, Ode to Joy, could be seen as Jeff Tweedy and company’s pandemic quarantine song. That’s because it simply advises the listener to not forget letting your friends know that you love them and will see them again when this crisis ends.

A few days after its premiere, “Tell Your Friends” was performed by Tweedy on the 29th episode of The Tweedy Show, the family’s Instagram video series that began in the early days of the coronavirus lockdown.

Tweedy family friend Nick Offerman, best known as Ron Swanson from the acclaimed sitcom Parks and Recreation, requested the song, but Jeff started played it before the request was relayed to him.

After Jeff performed a great solo acoustic version of “Tell Your Friends,” Susie Tweedy asked how her husband knew that that was Nick’s request.

“I’ve been sharing that song with Nick,” he replied. Susie then said, “Ah, a little off-the-grid communicado.” Then Susie said, “Nick wants to hear, ‘C’mon let’s twist again.’”

This refers to the song outright saying, “C’mon, let’s twist again,” but the context being that that is something we all need to do when this is all over is what makes that work.

It’ll probably be a long time until we are able to hear “Tell Your Friends” performed live by Wilco, but the fact that they are gifting us now with such a thoughtful tune will surely help us get through.

Post note: “Tell Your Friends” is available for immediate download with a charitable contribution. Donations will go directly to World Central Kitchen, an organization working across America to safely distribute fresh meals in communities that need support.

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Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “Box Full Of Letters”

The cover for the CD-single of Wilco's “Box Full Of Letters” (Reprise, 1995) 

Welcome to the latest entry in the Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight in which an excerpt about a choice track by the band from my book, Wilcopedia, is featured. So let’s get right to it:

“Box Full Of Letters” (Jeff Tweedy)

Jeff Tweedy: vocals, guitar

John Stirratt: bass, vocals

Max Johnston: Dobro

Ken Coomer: drums

Brian Henneman: guitars

Wilco’s first single, which appears as the third track on A.M., is a sprightly jingle-jangle of a song concerning a couple splitting up their belongings before going their separate ways, as sung by Jeff Tweedy in a matter-of-fact manner.

Many fans and critics felt the song referred to Jay Farrar, Tweedy’s estranged former partner in Uncle Tupelo. There was a well-documented falling out when that band dissolved, so the assumption does seem apt, but the song’s strength lies in its flexibility; it is relatable to anybody who’s had bittersweet feelings about a breakup.

In an interview with Chuck Taggart of the Chicago Reader, published a week before A.M.’s release, Tweedy said the song shouldn’t be seen as being about his estrangement from Farrar because “it’s just a straight pop relationship song,” before adding, “Jay and I didn’t share records.”

As Wilco’s style developed, such straightforward songs as “Box Full Of Letters’ became a thing of the past. It still pops up in the band’s setlists, but like the rest of the material on A.M., it’s a signifier of a very different era - an era during which Wilco were an alt.country concoction very much in the shadow of Uncle Tupelo. Despite this, it remains one of their catchiest and most enduring songs.

Wilco made their television debut performing “Box Full Of Letters” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien on June 9, 1995; they also made a video for the song, which featured on the popular MTV animated series Beavis & Butt-Head. 

A spare, slowed-down version of the song, featuring only Bennett and Tweedy and recorded live at C’est What in Toronto, Ontario, on November 20, 1996, would appear on the Summerteeth And Sum Aren’t promo CD in 1999, and was later included on the Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014 box set.

Although Wilco have taken lengthy breaks from playing “Box Full Of Letters’ live, with no documented performances of it at all during 1997–2000 and 2003–2007, it continues to be a go-to audience favorite, and in recent years has been played regularly, including at almost every show the band played during 2015–2017.

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

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Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”

This series has been on hiatus since late last year, but it is starting back up today with the spotlight shining on one of Wilco’s best known songs:

“I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” (Jeff Tweedy)

The striking opening track of Wilco’s fourth studio album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, has become a signature song for the band.

It earned such status by being a game-changer in terms of the perception of who the band are and were. It sounded like no other song they’d done before, yet it had the familiarity of Tweedy’s laid-back rasp for fans to latch onto.

Beginning with arguably the best opening couplet of any of Wilco’s albums, “I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the avenue,’ the song proceeds through punctuating walls of sound that seem to contain every instrument that exists, which isn’t so far-fetched as it sounds.

In a 2002 interview, former Wilco member Jay Bennett claimed to have played pump organ, Wurlitzer, two different pianos, a ‘noiz’ section (including toy piano), distorted synth, and manually re-amped drum effects on the track. It’s an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production, for sure.

“The arrangement of it evolved over a long time,” Tweedy told Martin Bandyke in a radio interview. “A lot of the pieces that kind of come and go, and the layers of noise, and just the chaos of it was an environment that evolved around the song more than something really mapped out initially. I think over time, the shapes started to emerge more.”

Midway through production of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jim O’Rourke was brought in to work with Wilco on the material, in particular this troublesome track. O’Rourke worked wonders on the song, weaving the sonic sections back together into a compelling albeit intermittently noisy narrative. 

Despite wanting to engineer and produce the album himself, Bennett admitted to Kot that the opener had been “a freaky fucked-up song, and [O’Rourke] made sense out of it.” (Fans can—and should—consult the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos bootleg to get an idea of what the song originally sounded like.)

As the finished, O’Rourke-assisted song became the intro to the album, critics took major notice. Rolling Stone magazine’s senior editor, David Fricke, called it “a minutely detailed portrait of the singer as blind drunk. Vibes, drums, piano, fuzz guitar and bicycle bells stumble over one another like they’ve been thrown out of a bar, and Tweedy slurs his metaphors in a heavy whiskey breath.”

Pitchfork’s Brent S. Sirota chimed in by describing the “slightly disconnected, piano-led” track as being ‘delicately laced with noise, whistles and percussive clutter, like some great grandson of ‘A Day In The Life.’”

One thing that more than a few critics noted was that amid the cacophony-filled breakdown at the song’s end, Tweedy can be heard singing “I’m The Man Who Loves You,”  foreshadowing the song of the same name that follows later in the album. This doesn’t appear in the demo, or in any live version of the song.

When Wilco play the song live, it sometimes starts quietly, with a lone acoustic guitar figure; others times, it sounds like somebody has just powered up HAL 9000, as a electronic hum, ominous buzzing, and sci-fi-sounding synths fill the air.

More than a few live versions of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” are officially available: a stunning airing of the song recorded during Wilco’s May 2005 residency at the Vic Theatre in Chicago appears on Kicking Television, while another exemplary take on the song, filmed at the Mobile Civic Center in Mobile, Alabama, on March 3, 2008, was included among the bonus material on the 2009 DVD Wilco Live: Ashes Of American Flags. 

That same year, another Chicago band, J.C. Brooks & The Uptown Sound, released a cover of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” that reworks Tweedy’s abstract lyrics into pop soul come-ons.

“When I sing “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” the unspoken line, I think, is if I could,’ Tweedy told D.I.W.’s Trevor Kelley in 2002. “I can only break my own heart - I can’t break yours. I look at most songs as reminders of an idea or something that has helped me.”

With nearly eight hundred live performances in the years since, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” is a helpful reminder of an idea that few of Wilco’s concerts are without.

An excerpt of a skeletal acoustic take of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” accompanies the credits at the beginning of Sam Jones’ 2002 documentary of the same name. Watch it below.

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

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