The Tweedy Show Returns Tonight For Its 201st Episode

The Tweedy Show, the quarantine-inspired Instagram series featuring the musical antics of Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy’s family, is returning tonight at 9pm CST for its 201st episode. Episode 200 aired just over a month ago on July 29th as Wilco was setting out on the “It’s Time” tour performing live for the first time since March 2020, which of course, is when the pandemic hit hard.

The Tweedy Show’s premiere episode, which aired on March 19, 2020, appears to be missing online, but almost every other of the 200 episodes can be found on YouTube. I haven’t seen every one of them, but what I have seen are a lot of fun. Susie shoots the show with her phone, never appearing on camera as she captures her husband Jeff, and sons Spencer and Sammy playing a choice assortment of heartfelt covers and Wilco songs.

The family hanging out vibe is largely represented as well. Lots of joking and reminiscing, augmented by comments from fans (who are referred to as “clients”) mostly making requests. Family friends like comic actor Jeff Garlin made appearances via Zoom (I think, not completely sure), Spencer’s girlfriend, Casey Walker, pops up in person to sing some of her songs, and maybe most importantly there was a mini-Wilco reunion with drummer Glenn Kotche and John Stirratt stopping by the Tweedy home to perform several fan favorites and debut a new Wilco tune, “Hints.” 

A few months later, Kotche came back this time with multi-instrumentalist Pan Sansone for another mini-reunion to lay down around round of well-loved tuneage.

The announcement of tonight’s episode was a pleasant surprise as a lot of fans, myself included, thought the series might be over what with Wilco’s tour schedule, but since the band is on a nearly two week break, why not get the show back together?

 

So tonight, I’m looking forward to hearing the lively intro-music, old school announcer, and seeing the cartoon versions of the Tweedy family appearing on their jukebox screen. Whether or not they’ll be any song surprises, I bet it’ll be a splendid hour to take in right to the end that will surely be capped off by the traditional Tweedy Show closer, Roger Miller’s “Reincarnation.”

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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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Watch Wilco perform on last night’s The Late Show

Wilco appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night to perform two songs: the brand new “Tell Your Friends” (featured in this week’s Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight), and “Jesus, Etc.” 

The band came together via separate livestreams which featured leader Jeff Tweedy and his sons Spencer and Sammy; John Stirratt, and his daughter Telula; Nels Cline and his wife Yuka Honda (and their dog); Glenn Kotche, his wife Miiri, and their kids; Pat Sansone, and Mikael Jorgensen, his wife Cassandra C. Jones, and their kids.

Check it out:

Following that, Tweedy played a superb solo acoustic version of one of his best songs:

As I reported yesterday, “Tell Your Friends” is available for immediate download with a charitable contribution.

Donations will go directly to World Central Kitchen, an organization working across America to safely distribute fresh meals in communities that need support.

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