Wilco Wednesday Song Spotlight: “New Madrid”

Today, the Spotlight shines on a song that's not technically a Wilco song as it was originally an Uncle Tupelo track, but when that band broke up, its author, Jeff Tweedy took it with him and has played it with Wilco and his other offshoots enough to render its origins kaput.

This entry was inspired by the news, posted by Kyle Thompson on Facebook, that today is the 209th Anniversary of  the great New Madrid earthquake.

“New Madrid” (Jeff Tweedy)

Jeff Tweedy: vocals, guitar
Jay Farrar: guitar
John Stirratt: bass
Max Johnston: banjo
Ken Coomer: drums

One of Jeff Tweedy’s best pre-Wilco compositions, “New Madrid” was one of four songs from Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne that the singer-songwriter continued to play after his former band’s breakup.

For John Tryneski of Spectrum Culture, the song is “a bouncy banjo-driven number that pokes fun at Iben Browning’s quackish predictions of a natural disaster in that Missouri town.” This refers to the Texas businessman and author who predicted that a major earthquake would hit the New Madrid Seismic Zone around December 2–3, 1990, and that the US Government would collapse in 1992.

 Of course, this didn’t happen, and as Jay Farrar would note in an interview in 1993, “Ironically, the town has really grown in population since then. People went there and decided it was a good place to live, and there’s been this huge influx of people.’ Jason Nickey, in a review of Uncle Tupelo’s 2003 compilation 89/93: An Anthology, wrote that, along with “Black Eye,” “New Madrid” “hints at the mysterious and complex lyrical turns [Tweedy] would explore later with Wilco.”

Wilco performed “New Madrid” at their first gig in November 1994, while Tweedy’s first solo acoustic show in late December that year also featured the song. Wilco continued to play the song a lot throughout the mid-to-late 90s, with close to fifty documented performances in 1997 alone; its presence dwindled in the 2000s, but it’s been played on every Wilco tour except their 2010 run.

More recently, in the years since the band’s twentieth anniversary tour, it’s been performed in a stripped-down ‘hootenanny’-style in a smattering of show encores. Meanwhile, Tweedy has performed the song more than a hundred times at solo shows or with his Tweedy side-project.

“New Madrid” was the only Tweedy original that was played during Wilco’s all-request/all-covers show at their Solid Sound Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts, on June 21, 2013. After that performance, Tweedy said that whomever it was in the audience that had requested the song should raise their hand. He then thanked the member of the crowd who did so, remarking, “Out of all of the songs in the world, that’s awesome...a wise, wise choice.”

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

More later...