Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “Art of Almost”

This week’s Song Spotlight shines on the seven-minute leadoff track on Wilco’s eighth studio album, The Whole Love:

“Art of Almost” (Jeff Tweedy)

Jeff Tweedy: acoustic guitar 
Nels Cline: electric guitar, loops 
Pat Sansone: Mellotron, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, tambourine 
Mikael Jorgensen: synthesizers, keyboards, programming 
John Stirratt: bass
Glenn Kotche: drums, percussion, cimbalom

With its opening crackle and the churning synthesizer groove that emerges from it, with added digital chimes, The Whole Love’s opening song initially sounds like a call back to the electronic soundscapes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born. 

“It started out as sort of a late-night slow-jam,” John Stirratt explained to Todd Marten of the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “When it was on our CD of demos, my subtitle for it was ‘Sade Song.’” 

“There are sides of John that I’ve never heard, and I’ve played with him eleven years,” Glenn Kotche remarked in the same interview, an oral history of the making of this song featuring insightful quotes from all of the band’s members. “Like, John can play funky? I didn’t know that. Wilco isn’t necessarily a funky band, but I don’t think there’s any other track where his fuzzed bass is sticking through.” 

Sansone described the song to Marten as an “in-the-computer, in-the-studio exercise,” Cline called it a “science project of a song,” and Tweedy recalled wanting to capture “the sound of broken hard drives, and the sound of data dying.” 

In an interview with Salon’s David Daley, Tweedy added that they “spent months and months and months” on the song. It ended up finishing the way a lot of later day Wilco songs finish, with Cline shredding the hell out of his guitar while the rest of the band work themselves into a frenzy. 

However, the revved-up mood of running to get back to the wasteland - a reference which, along with the line “blame it all on dust,” seems like it was derived from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland—gives the song a very different feel to the more ornamental guitar interplay that concludes such songs as “Impossible Germany” or “Bull Black Nova.”

An alternate take of ‘Art Of Almost’ appears on Wilco’s ten-inch EP Speak Into The Rose, which was released on red vinyl for Record Store Day on November 25, 2011, while a live version of the song, recorded at Bayfront Festival Park in Duluth, Minnesota, on July 9, 2013, appears on the compilation College Radio Day: The Album, Vol. 2, released by College Radio Day Records on November 12, 2013. 

“There’s a certain faction of Wilco fans that I think has felt maligned by the directness of the last couple of records,” Tweedy told Rolling Stone’s Austin Scaggs in 2011. “‘Art of Almost’ scratches that itch for them.”

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: “Can’t Stand It”

This week, the Song Spotlight shines on the lead-off track, and first single from their third studio album, Summerteeth:

“Can’t Stand It” (Jay Bennett, Jeff Tweedy)

Jeff Tweedy vocals, electric guitar, backing vocals 
Jay Bennett piano, keyboards 
John Stirratt bass 
Ken Coomer drums

This shiny, XTC-ish rocker was written at request of Reprise after Wilco turned in the first mix of Summerteeth. In an echo of Tom Petty’s line from his 1991 song “Into The Great Wide Open” (“The A&R man said, I don’t hear a single”), Jeff Tweedy went off and wrote this song and recorded it with Wilco, before department head David Kahne remixed it in hopes of getting radio airplay.

“Well, we really wanted to make a pop record,” Tweedy told Rolling Stone’s Richard Skanse in 1999. “Warner Bros didn’t think we had a single until we recorded ‘Can’t Stand It.’ They didn’t think we had anything that could be played on the radio, and we were like, But these are our idea of pop songs. We think they should all be on the radio.”

Even with its added bells (literally) and whistles, however, ‘Can’t Stand It’ peaked at #4 on the Triple-A Modern Rock chart, and failed to crossover to the Alternative charts.

However, the song peaked at #67 on the UK Singles Chart, which remains their highest charting single on that chart. This actually isn’t a bad ranking for a song that’s key line is “no love’s as random as God’s love,” and “your prayers will never be answered again.”

Despite being made to order, the song is one of Wilco’s reliable rockers; they’ve played it on every tour, resulting in over 150 individual performances.

A primo live version from the Riviera Theatre in Chicago on May 7, 1999, was released on the compilation CD, On XRT From The Archives Volume 5, and later found a home on the 2014 box set, Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014.

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: “Dash 7”

This week, the Spotlight shines on one of Wilco’s most overlooked tunes:

“Dash 7” (Jeff Tweedy)

Jeff Tweedy: vocals, acoustic guitar

Lloyd Maines: pedal steel

This spare track has been performed less than a handful of times (three) by the band, making it one of the least-performed songs off of Wilco’s first album, A.M. (1995). It is also the song from the album that they took the longest time to get around to playing live, as they didn’t perform it until February 2008, during their residency at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago, thirteen years after its release.

“That doesn’t happen very often, thanks for being quiet for that,” Tweedy remarked after their first ever performance of “Dash 7,” and then quipped “I was 7 foot 3, when I wrote that song.”

In solo performance, Tweedy has performed the song a documented seven times starting with a stab at it at his wife’s long defunct club, the Lounge Ax, in November of 1997. In 2010, Tweedy performed the song with Wilco guitarist Nels Cline taking on the pedal steel guitar part, at the Solid Sound Festival. 

The Wilco Book contains a lengthy essay by author Rick Moody (best known for his novel The Ice Storm) entitled “Five Songs,”  which over the course of three long paragraphs attempts to break down “Dash 7.”  

Describing it as “the strangest, and most out-of-place song on A.M.,” Moody notes that the song “makes use of modal tuning, and passing chords as a way to get at some really acute loneliness.”

Without completely disregarding Moody’s theorizing about the song, which he admits might be “just a song about touring,” I don’t hear impending doom in “Dash 7.” No, despite the melancholy mood the steel guitar sets, I hear something life-affirming in the softly sung chorus, “Because I’ve found the way those engines sound will make you kiss the ground.”

The song’s title is taken from the nickname for a turbo-prop passenger airplane first built in the 70s. At the time of writing, the last live airing of the song occurred at the Riviera Theatre on December 9, 2014 (available on Roadcase 43).

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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