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.

More later...