Edward Burch: The Wilcopedia Interview Part 1

Not long ago, I had a great conversation with Edward Burch, a St. Louis-based musician who works at the Animal Protective Association of Missouri. Since this is Wilcopedia (The Blog), I was very interested in speaking with Burch about his collaboration with his friend Jay Bennett, a member of Wilco from 1994-2001, with whom he recorded an album after he left the band, and toured with in the early 2000s.

On September 26, Bennett and Burch’s 2002 release, The Palace at 4am (Part 1), will be released on vinyl for the first time for Record Store Day. In Part 1 of my interview with him, we talked about that superb record.

Daniel Johnson: “I am excited about this release on vinyl of The Palace at 4am. I really love that album – when it came out, I played the hell out of it. So I have some questions about it – how it came about, because Jay Bennett had been in Wilco for several years, and was instrumental in some of Wilco’s best recordings, and when he left he took some songs with him, and a few of those are on this album.”

Edward Burch: “Yeah, so there were two songs that were leftovers from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. One was, at the time, called ‘Alone.’”

DJ: “Which was ‘Shakin’ Sugar.’”

EB: “’Shakin’ Sugar,’ yeah – that’s what we called it. So the original Wilco demo was - ‘cause this was a period when Jay and Jeff (Tweedy) were often held up in the Loft studio in Chicago because at the time John (Stirratt) had not quite yet relocated to Chicago, and he was still in Nashville so Jay and Jeff (Tweedy) were doing a lot of stuff just together as a duo whether it was demos or otherwise. So they did this demo for this song called ‘Alone’ and Jay was playing pretty much everything – drums, bass, guitars, and Jeff did his vocal and then there were some other bits put on, and because that song never made the cut on YHF - I mean, it might’ve been a good song for that record, I’m not sure.

Because that song didn’t make it, I think Jay was being a bit, somewhat protective, maybe somewhat reacting in anger or disappointment to his removal from the band he decided that because they’re going to keep playing a bunch of songs that I had a lot to do with writing and arranging, I can take a couple other songs that I had a lot to do with although it was a Jeff lyric and put them on my record. I think that was kind of his mindset. So that’s how ‘Alone’ and ‘Venus Stopped the Train’ ended up on our album.”

DJ: “That’s a real stand-out to me. ‘Venus Stopped the Train’ was like this gorgeous, I don’t know if ballad is the right word…”

EB: “Oh no, it’s definitely a ballad.”

DJ: “Now, Wilco has never released a version of that. They could release their demo of it if they do a YHF Deluxe Edition, but it felt like that was one of those that was co-written that was given its rightful home on Palace.”

EB: “Well, that’s very kind. I obviously have heard, and I know the bootlegs circulate, that has the original demo that’s basically just Jay on piano, and Jeff singing. – obviously, it’s Jay’s music and Jeff’s lyric - but Jeff on that vocal, on that demo, to me it just kills. It’s amazing. I was happy to sing it on the record, and did my best with my capacities, but it’s a great song, and you have to work hard to fuck up a really great song.

So one of the things that Jay and I bonded over was definitely our love of Elvis Costello, and that certainly rears its head on Palace at 4am. We were very taken with the Rhino re-issues of Elvis’s catalogue. The album, Goodbye Cruel World, which in its original release – great songs, but its production was god awful, and getting to hear the early demos and the early working versions of material before they chose the production aesthetic they did, which was heavily driven by the Yamaha DX7, which ruined many great records in the ‘80s.

So we were listening to the extras on the second disc (of the re-issue of Goodbye Cruel World), and were like ‘oh, this is what those songs were supposed to be.’ That was very illuminating about how production choices can influence how a song can be received. So bringing this back around to the fact that Palace on vinyl is finally happening, we always intended that it would happen…”

DJ: “Vinyl in 2002 just wasn’t a thing.”

EB: “No, in fact the joke that we like to make – I say ‘we’ because I’m speaking for Jay even though he’s not here, but he would agree with this – when we mixed mastered that CD in 2002, that’s the period that recording engineers, and musicians referred to as the ‘great CD loudness wars.’ The way things were mastered were pushing things really up, and things could sound really brittle, or otherwise. Of course, our record was insanely dense with a lot of instrumentation, and Mike Hagler, god bless him, when we were initially doing the mixing, his first job was literally…we called him ‘the chainsaw.’ He would go through and cut a bunch of stuff out before we even began to start think about mixing this.

The end result, I think for me and Mike, and maybe Jay – it’s hard to say – we felt that we still might’ve left too much in. But what Mike Hagler, at Kingsize in Chicago – he worked on the Mermaid sessions, he worked on the Summerteeth sessions, he might’ve been briefly involved in Being There – actually what I learned today, I was searching on Discogs, because I was like, I want an LP copy of the My Morning Jacket album, At Dawn, so I was looking on Discogs trying to find a copy, and I scrolled down and was like ‘holy shit! Mike Hagler did the mastering on that record too!’ And that’s like one of my favorite albums of theirs.

So Mike, he was the guy that I chose to approach when Stephen (Judge) from Schoolkids Records got in touch with me, and said ‘I would like to put this record out on vinyl and I was like ‘that’s awesome - we need to make sure that we master it properly to vinyl because Jay’s not here anymore, and I don’t have the ears of a recording engineer to know the sonic specifics, and I know that Jay did, and I would not want to sign off on anything that would not be what Jay wanted for the record to sound like on an LP. I knew that Mike had worked with Jay enough that he knew what Jay would want a record to sound like. So like ‘are you willing to do the LP master for this?’ And of course, he said yes.

The first thing I heard before they did the test pressings was digital. I was like, alright – sounds like we’re in the right place. And then, when I got to hear the vinyl test pressing, I was completely floored. And also a bit emotional, but I listened to it, and like now, it finally sounds like the record that Jay and I wanted to release. The way the mastering happened, it brought certain things forward that you weren’t necessarily hearing in the previous mastering for CD.

One of the things that I absolutely love, and this was something that Jay always talked about, is ‘let’s master like they do for all the great ‘70s records where the drums are pushed a little back but they’re there, they’re definitely holding things together, but they’re not upfront and being loud and crazy, and that sort of thing. The only reason I agreed to get this record out on vinyl was I knew it was something that Jay wanted, and I realized that I needed really good professional help to make sure that we get this to sound the way that it should, and, thanksfully going to the source – Mike Hagler is one of the finest engineers – recording, mastering, otherwise – that our nation has to offer. He’s amazing.”

DJ: “It’s funny that when this album was first released – I think it was April of 2002 – it was the same day as Wilco’s YHF, and Paul Westerberg’s Stereo/Mono album. So it was like this embarrassment of riches that day.”

EB: “I’m as cynical as they come, but the cynical among us would assume that we chose to release Palace on the same day as YHF…”

DJ: “In what’s been written about Wilco, it is presented in that cynical manner with Bennett insisting that it was a coincidence, but I really doubt he had any choice in the release date. Did he?”

EB: “No. So our manager Bob picked a release date. At that point, we had no idea that YHF was coming out, and so when we had the release date then that generated all of the deadlines that had to proceed coming up to that – when we had to have artwork in, when we had to have the masters of the record in – all of that sort of stuff.

Then it just ended up that later we saw that YHF was the same day, and we weren’t displeased because Jay was like ‘hey, I have two records coming out on the same day.’ It was fortunate for us because that meant that a lot of people wanted to do a big story on Wilco, and do a little sidebar on us and we got a little extra publicity but I can assure you that it was never a calculated move.”

Coming soon: Part 2 of the Wilcopedia interview with Edward Burch