Previous editions of Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight have featured excerpts from my 2019 book, Wilcopedia, but this is a never before published entry (for a future second edition) about a track that was released on the band’s 11th studio album, Ode to Joy:
“Everyone Hides” (Jeff Tweedy)
One of Ode to Joy’s most accessible tracks, this jaunty tune was released on September 17, 2019 as the album’s second single. With its finger-picked guitar figure, and bouncy bass-line, the song lightens the mood of the album as if it’s saying that things don’t always need to be so heavy.
But then you pay attention to the lyrics, sung by Tweedy with a casual flippancy enhanced by double tracking, one realizes that it’s a very personal tune epitomized in lines like “If you’re selling yourself on a vision / A dream of who you are / An idea of how it should be / And a wish upon a star.”
“Everyone Hides” begins delicately, with a subtle rhythmic progression, as more and more spare layers get added to the mix. It gets itself worked up towards the end as instruments’ paths collide, but in a restrained yet still melodic manner that is wrapped up quite pleasingly.
If “Everyone Hides” sounds more like a Tweedy solo song than the work of Wilco, that’s because it originated with his band, Tweedy. The film was featured in the Theodore Melfi’s 2014 comedy “St. Vincent,” starring Bill Murray, and appeared as the lead off track on the film’s soundtrack. As this is the only place that this version of ‘Everyone Hides’ can be found, it’s worth a purchase for completist fans (it also contains another Tweedy exclusive, “Why Why Why”).
The same day that the song was released online, a video for “Everyone Hides”dropped that quickly made the rounds through many music and pop culture sites. The video concerned the members of Wilco traipsing around Chicago playing hide-and-seek while their leader was cozy back at the Loft. It’s fitting for the song’s premise about people concealing their true natures to inspire a setting for a citywide hide-and-seek game.
In early October 2019, Tweedy talked with All Songs Considered host, Bob Boilen, about the making of the video for “Everyone Hides”: “We had asked around for some treatments, from different directors of what to do with a song like that with a video, and at the end of the day we just said ‘why don’t we just play hide ‘n seek in Chicago, and I thought it would be funny if everyone else in the band went to hide and I just locked the door and sat on the couch and watched TV.
“Everyone Hides” was first performed live by Wilco at Tapperiet Scene in Trondheim, Norway on September 19, 2019. Later that month, on September 30, the band played the song on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:
As of this writing, there have been over 100 airings of “Everyone Hides” by Wilco, with Tweedy also contributing a solo version of it on Episode 39 of the Instagram program, The Tweedy Show, on May 1, 2020.
More later...
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