Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “Many Worlds”

This entry of the Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight shines on a track from Jeff Tweedy, and company’s latest album, Cruel Country. It is the first song to be covered from Wilco’s 12th studio release in this series, so this serves as a preview of its future entry in an updated edition of my book, Wilcopedia:

“Many Worlds” (Jeff Tweedy)

Smack dab in the middle, kicking off the second LP or CD of the Cruel Country album, is this seven minute and 53 second pensive, light piano dirge, which initially recalls Tweedy’s meditations in such songs as “Reservations” and “Solitaire.” A slight crackling static opens the track’s aural synth background (courtesy of Mikael Jorgensen), then the haunting keys to cradle Tweedy’s soft vocals: “When I look at the sky, I think about stars that’ve died.”

It only goes to show that in what the Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber called a “eight-minute-long new-age cryfest,” even Wilco is in on the big multi-verse trend (as evidenced by Marvel movies, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Tik Tok whatnot et al) of the day as Tweedy concludes, “Many worlds collide, none like yours and mine.” Its following the similarly themed and toned track, “The Universe,” on the album makes that case too.

After three and a half minutes of these simple, repeated lines, the strands of this melody fade into the slight crackle as a lone acoustic guitar strums into the mix. Then Glenn Kotche’s drums, John Stirratt’s thudding bass, and more twinkling axe action via Nels Cline, and Pat Sansone joins in, until a rich Grateful Dead-style jam is in full progress. It flourishes, and fleshes out the tune for several minutes until wearily winding down into silence, the crackling having fully passed.

Technically, Wilco has only performed “Many Worlds” once in full when it was premiered at their Solid Sound Music Festival at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, on May 27, 2022, but its instrumental coda as the outro to “Via Chicago,” has been performed around 20 times at every show following its debut.

Watch the live premiere of “Many Worlds” at Solid Sound (distant but still decent quality):

And witness the song’s coda as added to the Wilco classic, “Via Chicago,” at the Budweiser Stage in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on August 18, 2022:

It will be interesting to see if the lyrical section of the song will return to performances of the song in the future. The first half of the song before the jam seems a shoo-in for Tweedy solo gigs so it’s likely we haven’t heard the last of our vocalist’s lament about the stars on a live stage yet.

Until then, “Via Chicago” gets enhanced by a lush outro that casts a lovely spell over Wilco’s current concerts. Whether it’s a permanent addition of a new trick to an old dog is yet to be seen.

 

More later...

20 Years Ago Today: I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART: A FILM ABOUT WILCO Hit The Big Screen

On this date in 2002, Sam Jones’ I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART: A FILM ABOUT WILCO was released in theaters. It came on the heels of the release of Wilco’s fourth studio album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which became a major story in the music business (and for fans) when the band was dropped from Reprise after turning in the album, multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett was unceremoniously dropped from the band, and Wilco found a new home with Nonesuch Records. Much of this activity was captured by Jones’ 16mm black and white camera in over 86 hours of footage, and then edited down to a mostly crisp 96 minutes that gave insights into Wilco’s creative process, and personal interaction, as well as presenting a bunch of killer live performances. Since I saw it in the summer of ’02 at the Varsity Theater in downtown Chapel Hill, it’s been one of my all-time favorite rock docs ever.

As this was back in the day with a much sparer internet, news of what your favorite band was up to could come rather slowly, but word was out in mid 2001 that Wilco’s much anticipated album, which had been set for a September 11 release (that’s right) was rejected by their label, and that both Bennett, and drummer Ken Coomer were now out of the band, so fans like me were clamoring to hear the record at the heart of this turmoil. Before Wilco themselves started streaming it for free, I found it somewhere online (can’t remember where) and it immediately became an all-time favorite record. It and Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft (which actually was released on 9/11/01) were my go-to albums for a long ass time, and still hit my turntable regularly.

The news that a film was being made about the sessions and album release aftermath was also in the mix as Jones was streaming unedited footage on his site (which is long gone) throughout late 2001-mid 2002. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was finally released on April 23, 2002, an anniversary which celebrated around that date by Wilco with shows in New York and Chicago, and will be further commemorated with several different box set collections being released in September, but since the film itself hasn’t gotten much notice lately, I thought a timely look back was in order.

From the press kit for I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART (2002)

I rewatched I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART again last night for the first time in I don’t know how long, and found it to be a little more rough, and disjointed than I remembered, but still a solidly structured narrative about a band and an industry in flux. Many critics were on the money hailing its cutting depiction of art versus commerce as the film begins with the band deep into sessions for YHF, and feeling like Reprise has got their backs. 

After footage of Wilco front man, Jeff Tweedy, laying down a vocal track for “Poor Places,” and a lovely credit sequence featuring Chicago as shot through the rain-covered windows of an automobile in motion set to an acoustic demo of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” we see the band rehearse and work on material at their Loft studio. The movie began shooting on the first day that drummer Glenn Kotche officially joined the band so that’s pretty damn notable.

We watch as Tweedy and Bennett talk up their situation with Bennett even saying, “I know it’s cool to bitch about your record label, but, I mean, they’re letting us make a record in our loft, and they haven’t heard a word of it. They’re giving us $85,000, and they haven’t heard a word of it.” As I wrote in Wilcopedia, “Like many of the multi-instrumentalist’s statements during the first half of the film, these words come back to bite Bennett’s ass in the second half.

But before we get to the central conflict, Jones gives us great, grainy footage of work-in-progress portions of the aforementioned “Poor Places,” “Ashes of American Flags,” and a fuzzy workout on “Kamera” (referred to as the “Troggs version in the DVD commentary.” There’s also some superb DONT LOOK BACK-esque excerpts (including “Via Chicago,” “Laminated Cat,” and “Sunken Treasure”) from a Tweedy solo show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

Now let’s dive into the stand-out scene in the – the argument between Tweedy and Bennett that foreshadowed the end of their relationship as collaborators and band members. This is an excerpt from my book of how it went down:

“Wilco reconvene at Chicago Recording Company Studios (aka CRC), where noted cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm is seen working out his part for ‘Reservations.’ There then follows a sequence of shots from the mixing board during work on ‘I’m The Man Who Loves You,’ which are used largely to set up the first event of friction in the film.

That would be the clash between Bennett and Tweedy, described in the commentary as the lowest moment in the making of the record, over the crucial edit between ‘Ashes of American Flags’ and ‘Heavy Metal Drummer.’Bennett keeps over-explaining his position about how to handle the mix while Tweedy tries and fails to be the peacemaker. It’s an incredibly awkward and painful scene that foreshadows Bennett’s dismissal from the band, and considering all that Bennett brought to Wilco during a key period in their career, it’s a shame that he’ll be largely remembered for this tense, awkward moment.

During a gig with his musical partner Edward Burch at the Local 506 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 2002 not long after the release of the documentary, Bennett said from the stage, ‘I’m not an asshole, despite what you’ve seen at the movies.’ Meanwhile, while recording their commentary for the DVD, the other members of Wilco found the scene so hard to watch that they left the room while it played, leaving Jones to do his best to give some insight into what happened. They return after the worst of the scene has gone by—just in time for the bit where a migraine-suffering Tweedy goes into a restroom to throw up (filmed by Jones over the top of the stall).”

Following that, Wilco continues to hone the YHF material, with live performances at First Avenue in Minneapolis, and Bennett’s last live show with the band, which takes place at Petrillo Music Shell in Chicago on July 4, 2001. 

Jay Bennett waves goodbye after his last show with Wilco, Chicago 7/4/01.

The next thing we know, Bennett is out of the band, and Reprise has let them know that if they don’t change the album they should take it elsewhere. We witness Wilco’s manager Tony Margherita bitch on the phone about the situation, while rock critics Greg Kot, who wrote the first book about the band, 2003’s Wilco: Learning How to Die; and Rolling Stone’s David Fricke bitch about the sad state of the music biz in the early aughts.

The film’s musical climax is a blistering version of “Monday” from the aforementioned Fillmore concert. Interestingly, “Monday” was one of Bennett’s favorite songs to play live, and Tweedy and Company performed live it in tribute to him when he passed in 2009. The film then closes with the song that Wilco would often use to open their shows around this time, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s ‘Pure Imagination,’ from the soundtrack to Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, as we see the four members of Wilco—Bach, Kotche, Stirratt, and Tweedy—walking around a Chicago lakefront with the skyline behind them and their now brighter future in front of them.

In 2015, Tweedy discussed the doc at a special screening of one of his favorite films, Chris Smith’s AMERICAN MOVIE (1999) with the Modern School of Film’s Robert Milazzo at the Carolina Theater in Durham.

Tweedy: “I haven’t seen it in a long time, but there were a lot of moments watching that movie, well, there were a lot of moments during the filming of that movie where, uh, the first time there was an observing ego in the room – the camera…”

Milazzo: “Camera – you do such a beautiful song called ‘Kamera,’ which speaks to that…

Tweedy: “It just felt like, I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to put myself outside of myself enough to see what a camera might be seeing. And so there were a lot of moments during the process of making that record where I was like ‘oh, no – oh, no, that’s what the camera is seeing.’ Obviously, this is not – our relationship with Jay (Bennett) for example was made painfully obvious that there was a big problem in the way we were interacting, the way he was interacting with the band. And it’s really sad that it took a camera to do that or that we weren’t together enough, or grown up enough as people to see that without a camera.”

Sadly, I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART isn’t as easily available as it should be these days. It’s not streaming on any of the majors – Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple, etc. – and the DVD is out of print with used copies being pretty pricey, but it can be found, broken up into segments on Youtube. It was long available on Vimeo for rent and purchase, but has been recently removed.

The day before the anniversary of the retail release of YHF back in April, Wilco was photographed at the offices of Criterion, which may be a sign of an upcoming re-issue of the DVD (with hope a Blu ray edition) of the doc.

This would be fantastic for Criterion to add this film to their esteemed Collection. If you don’t know Criterion, they put out deluxe, often definitive editions of movies, and while the original had an extra disc of excellent material, fans know that there was a lot of stuff (the aforementioned 86 hours) Jones shot for the film (Jay Bennett said “We gave him three movies. It should’ve been a box set”), and this would be a great way for that stuff to see the light of day. 

I wrote to suggestions@criterion.com to request it, and hope my fellow fans will do the same. It ideally would help get it streaming again on their channel too.

So Happy 20th Anniversary to I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART. Here’s hoping more folks, whether hardcore or casual Wilco fans, will give it a watch in tribute.

More later…

Wilco's Mini-Tour For The 20th Anniversary Of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Wraps Up Wonderfully

Wilco’s mini-tour for the 20th Anniversary of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which consisted of five nights at United Palace Theatre in New York (April 15-20), and three nights at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago (April 22-24), wrapped up last Saturday evening with a magnificent performance of the album that was broadcast via nugs.net. While envious of the fans who witnessed the event in person, I was delighted to view it from my couch (and exercise bike), and bathe in the vivid recreation of the original record’s sonic landscape, and yet again absorb the beauty of one of Wilco’s best batches of songs.

Of course, everyone reading this knows the track-listing of YHF, but for completeness sake in reporting the setlists for the last five shows (I covered the first three here), here are the 11 songs that began each show:

 

“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” / “Kamera” / “Radiom Cure” / “War on War” / “Jesus, Etc.” / “Ashes of American Flags” / “Heavy Metal Drummer” / “I’m the Man Who Loves You” / “Pot Kettle Black” / “Poor Places” / “Reservations”

 

Following that, here’s the encores for each night:

 

Union Palace Theatre, NYC 4/19:

 

“Be Not So Fearful” (Bill Fay cover) / “Pieholden Suite” / “Cars Can’t Escape” / “A Magazine Called Sunset” / “Hummingbird” / “The Good Part” / “I Got You (At the End of the Century)” / “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”

 

Union Palace Theatre, NYC 4/20:

 

“Be Not So Fearful” / “Pieholden Suite” / “Cars Can’t Escape” / “A Magazine Called Sunset” / “Hummingbird” / “The Good Part” / “Monday” / “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”

 

Auditorium Theatre, Chicago 4/22:

 

“Be Not So Fearful” / “Pieholden Suite” / “Cars Can’t Escape” / “A Magazine Called Sunset” / “Hummingbird” / “The Good Part” / “Monday” / “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”

 

Auditorium Theatre, Chicago 4/23:

 

“Be Not So Fearful” / “Pieholden Suite” / “Cars Can’t Escape” / “A Magazine Called Sunset” / “Hummingbird” / “The Good Part” / “I Got You (At the End of the Century)” / “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”

 

Auditorium Theatre, Chicago 4/24:

 

“Be Not So Fearful” / “Pieholden Suite” / “Cars Can’t Escape” / “A Magazine Called Sunset” / “Hummingbird” / “The Good Part” / “Monday” / “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”

 

Yes, these encores are very similar with only slight variations, but I’m recounting them here for, you know, completeness sake.

 

Now Wilco returns to The Loft for more work on their twelve studio album (subscribe to Tweedy’s Starship Casual on Substack.com for some exclusive listens of works-in-progress), for the next month; then they will return on May 27 for the seventh Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCa in North Adams, MA. Tickets for the three day event are available at wilcoworld.net.

 

That’s all for now. If you haven’t already, check out Wilcopedia (The Blog)’s post about the new Jay Bennett documentary directed by Gorman Bechard, and Fred Uhter. 

 

More later…

Jay Bennett Gets His Documentary Due With Some New Records Too

In the last episode of Wilcopedia (The Blog), the focus was on the coverage of the 20th Anniversary of the release of Wilco’s breakthrough masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but there’s an important sidebar to the story that wasn’t given ample space.

That would be that the album’s co-creator, former Wilco member Jay Bennett (1963-2009), is sharing the same anniversary as his collaboration with Edward Burch, The Palace at 4am (Part 1), was released on the same day (April 23, 2002) as YHF, and the multi-instrumentalist is the subject of a new documentary, Gorman Bechard and Fred Uhter’s JAY BENNETT, WHERE ARE YOU?, which dropped on DVD/Blu ray on April 19.

Bechard and Uhter’s film is a thorough portrait of the life and career of Bennett from his upbringing in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, to his time in the power pop group, Titanic Love Affair, and then onto his defining role in Wilco, mastering various instruments, and collecting all kinds of vintage gear along the way. Bennett had joined Jeff Tweedy and company too late to be a part of their debut, A.M., but just in time to be a touring member, and his influence in the studio was big on the band’s still rootsy, but much wider-ranging second album, Being There, and even bigger on the orchestral pop of the follow-up, Summerteeth.

As the legend goes, the sessions for YHF were where Bennett and Tweedy’s once infectiously fruitful collaboration fell apart, which resulted in Bennett’s departure. The filmmakers have assembled a rich roster of interviewees to take us through these sometimes uneasy background beats including Bennett’s mother Janis, his musical partner, Edward Burch; Greg Kot, who wrote the first book on the band, Wilco: Learning How to Die (2004); original Wilco drummer Ken Coomer, former Wilco production manager Jonathan “JP” Parker, British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, and Nora Guthrie. Tweedy declined to be in the film, so he’s represented by excerpts from the audiobook of his autobiography, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.

Of course, some of the ground well trodden in Sam Jones’ I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART - i.e. Bennett and Tweedy’s awkward, edgy argument during the YHF sessions – is trodden over again, but it’s really affecting to hear phone recordings of Bennett trying to cope with the sad situation, and to get his friends’ takes on how damaging his portrayal in that documentary was to him.

Bennett followed up Palace at 4am, which got its first ever vinyl release last year, with five solo albums, the last two of which, Whatever Happened I Apologize (2008), and Kicking at the Perfumed Air (2010), were released on vinyl together on Record Store Day, in gate-fold packaging that makes it look like the soundtrack to the documentary, but very little (none?) of the music is actually in the film. No matter, it’s a cool double album that captures the last chapter of the man’s immaculately tuneful career. And the 2LP set comes with a DVD of the documentary too.

JAY BENNETT, WHERE ARE YOU? is a loving doc depiction of a man who lived for music, and left a large stamp on the sound of Wilco, and in the hearts of all the rock ‘n roll lovers who came into his orbit. With hope, the abundant passion within Bechard and Uhter’s portrait will help to keep the master musician from fading into a footnote. I believe it will be greatly beneficial to Bennett’s legacy, and I’m not just saying that because a quote of mine from Wilcopedia appears in the film. Well, maybe a little.

Extras: The five hours of bonus material includes full interviews with Coomer, Bragg, Jay’s mom, Janis; Deleted Scenes, Q&A with Directors, World Premiere Tribute Concert, and more (including something called “Ketchup, Ketchup, and More Ketchup,” which I obviously haven’t watched yet).

For more about Bennett, and this documentary, please check out my epic three part interview with Edward Burch: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

More later…

What’s Up With Wilco: The Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 20th Anniversary Season

We are now in the midst of the 20th Anniversary season for Wilco’s breakthrough masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and there’s a lot of activity to cover. I mean, a lot.

Although many fans consider YHF, as we’ll abbreviate it from here on, to be a 2001 album, as it began streaming online on September 18, 2001 (the album’s original Reprise Records release date was 9/11/01), the “retail release” of the album was April 23, 2002. So to celebrate this milestone, Jeff Tweedy and company are currently performing concerts at Union Palace in New York, in which they present the entire album in order, then offer up an encore of fan favorites (which could mean any of their songs).

There was a bit of a mini-controversy on the first night (April 15) of Wilco’s run at Union Palace, as they only performed three songs as an encore to the 11-song cycle of YHF, and many fans were disappointed with the set’s overall length of an hour and 15 minutes. I have to say I probably would’ve been a little miffed too had I spent the money on tickets and travel to the event, as this is a band that’s played many rich, lengthy sets in their lifetime, but such an occasion in which one of the greatest records ever is presented in its entirety is a very special gift-horse that shouldn’t be looked in the mouth.

Especially when considering the care Wilco has gone to recreate YHF as it was originally introduced to the world, stripping away elements that have gathered on the songs as they’ve evolved on stage over the last two decades. For the first three nights at Union Palace (April 15-17), Wilco’s sets, aided by the Aizuri (String) Quartet, and American jazz trombonist / vocalist Natalie Cressman, comprised of the YHF tracks as follows:

“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” / “Kamera” / “Radiom Cure” / “War on War” / “Jesus, Etc.” / “Ashes of American Flags” / “Heavy Metal Drummer” / “I’m the Man Who Loves You” / “Pot Kettle Black” / “Poor Places” / “Reservations”

Then the encore of the aforementioned first show of the tour on Friday, April 15, contained Bill Fay’s “Be Not So Fearful,” and two songs that were played in honor of Jay Bennett (1963-2009), “Pieholden Sweet,” and “Magazine Called Sunset.” Preceding these tunes, Tweedy spoke about his former musical partner saying, “We’d like to dedicate these next few songs to Jay Bennett, who helped make this record. We all wish he was here to celebrate with us, you know, these songs go out to him wherever he is.”

The next night (April 16), Wilco reprised those three tunes in the encore, but added “Cars Can’t Escape,” “Hummingbird,” “Red-Eyed and Blue,” “I Got You (At the End of the Century),” and “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” so maybe Tweedy took the fans’ complaints to heart? The third show of the five night Union Palace residency on April 17 also featured a similar eight song encore, but “Red-Eyed and Blue” was replaced by the YHF-era B-side “The Good Part.”

Last night, Wilco appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to play “Poor Places” with the Aizuri Quartet. Watch the stirringly stunning performance:

After Wilco finishes their next two shows tonight, and tomorrow night, at Union Palace, they’re on to Auditorium Theatre in Chicago for three concerts on April 22, 23, and 24. The event on the 23rd (the actual anniversary of the release) will be livestreamed by nugs.net.

Today, it was announced that the highly anticipated Deluxe Edition of YHF will be available come this September. Actually, make that seven different Deluxe Re-issues, which would take up too much space to detail here so I’ll direct you to wilcoworld.net for info on the various configurations that include multi-vinyl, and CD packages with loads of demos, outtakes, drafts, live recordings, and a primo radio appearance.

That radio event – Wilco live on Sound Opinions 9/18/01 – is available to listen to now as it’s been re-broadcast as Show 854 (Revisiting Yankee Hotel Foxtrot With Wilco, April 8, 2022). It’s great that it’s accessible again as the episode was unavailable, and hard to find online for years – something I found as I was researching my book, Wilcopedia, in the 2010s, and would be seeking out quotes from the YHF era. Wilco’s performance and interview with hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, who wrote the first book on the band, Wilco: Learning How to Die (2004), is notable for having taken place a week after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in NYC.

Lastly, and most humorously, Wilco collaborated with an Old Town Foxtrot store (1562 N. Wells St., Chicago) for a pop-up event held today featuring a collection of Wilco-themed snacks and drinks. The limited-edition items include Wilc-O’s Cereal, a partnership with Off Limits; Broken Heart Custom Gummies; and Jesus Don’t Cry Pilsner with Great Central Brewing.

Stay tuned to this space for more YHF 20th Anniversary coverage plus a post about the concurrent activity around events this week celebrating Jay Bennett, as there is a documentary, Gorman Bechard’s JAY BENNETT, WHERE ARE YOU?, and two Record Store Day releases of Bennett material set for April 23. Click back here in the next day or so to read more about it.

What’s Up With Wilco: March 2022

Seeing as it’s now mid-March, and I haven’t posted in a bit, it’s a good time to bring us up-to-date with all the happening Wilco whatnot. 

Since my last post, the big news is still Wilco’s upcoming celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, beginning with a five show run at Union Palace in NYC from April 15-17, and then three shows at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago from April 22nd to the 24th.

The first few Union Palace shows (4/15, 4/16) are sold out, but tickets are still available for the remaining dates. Go to Wilco’s official website, wilcoworld.net, for more information.

I had also previously reported the rumor that a 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of YHF is being prepped for release later this year, but there’s been no news on that front that I can find. 

But on the murmurings of Wilco being at work on a new album, Jeff Tweedy wrote in his Casual Starship Newsletter that he and his bandmates were “chipping away at some new music,” and shared a work-in-progress snippet entitled “Eye Glue (Amazing Grace),” which he said “is fairly representative of roughly a third of the material” that they’ve sorted through. Listen to the excerpt here.

 

Next week, it will be the two-year anniversary of The Tweedy Show, the live Instagram program that came about because of the pandemic lockdown in March 2020. For over 212 episodes, the Tweedy family has well served their fans (or clients as they’ve been called) with hundreds of performances of Wilco songs, Tweedy originals, and an encyclopedic range of iconic rock covers, interspersed with zany verbal shenanigans between Jeff, Susie, Spencer, and Sammy, as well as cameos from famous friends, and other family.

Many, not all, of The Tweedy Show episodes are available on YouTube, so there’s lots there to keep fans busy. But don’t go looking for the famous first episode that caught Jeff in the bathtub taking a bubble bath, because apparently that’s one that’s missing. The one that inspired this promo art by Jumble® cartoonist/Wilco fan Jeff Knurek, that is:

Finally, those who like to Netflix and chill may have heard Wilco pop up in a recent episode of Space Force. The silly workplace satire, which stars Steve Carrell as the head of a new military division devoted to conquering the heavens, featured the band contributing a demo for the Space Force Anthem.

We get to hear a bit of Wilco’s entry in a boardroom scene in episode six, “The Doctor’s Appointment” (February 18, 2022), of the newly released second season. Space Force social media director, F. Tony Scarapiducci (Ben Schwartz) informs his coworkers that he’s found the winner in the “Space Force Anthem” sweepstakes: “Indie rock darlings, Wilco.”

The familiar acoustic sound of Jeff Tweedy and company then fills the conference room, with the lead singer softly singing, “If you’re looking for a beautiful space, with a place for everything you love - closets and pantries and cabinets and shelves…”

 

Upon hearing this, Carrell’s character, General Mark R. Naird, asks “Why are they singing about cabinets and shelves?” F. Tony explains that, “Wilco thought that Space Force was a group of people that come to your house, and offer storage solutions, make everything cleaner, and I did not correct them.”

 

More later...

Wilco Set To Celebrate Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s 20th Live

Wilco announced earlier today that they will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of their breakthrough masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with a series of shows in New York and Chicago. At Union Palace in NYC from April 15-17, and Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on April 22nd and 23nd, Wilco will perform the album in its entirety (no word whether they’ll mix up the song order), and then they are promising to play rarities and fan favorites to fill the shows out.

It’s hard to believe that on April 23rd, Wilco’s fantastic fourth album will be 20 years old. But wait a second, many fans, like me, consider YHF to be a 2001 album. That’s because it was streamed online on Wilco’s official website on September 18, 2001. Many fans, like me, had heard it before that as it had been leaked over the summer of that year. The album’s set release on Reprise Records was originally September 11 (that’s right, 9/11), but Jeff Tweedy and Company were dropped by their label and…well, you know the rest (if not there’s several books, and a documentary you should see).

Wilco's new promotional picture taken by Charles Harris

So April 23 has been retconned as the official retail release date of YHF. This is why some critics voted for it as the best album of both 2001 and 2002. There are also rumors that there will be a deluxe box set, which will compile many of the demos, and outtakes from the album’s sessions. Much of this material has already been in fan’s hands as they’ve circulated as bootlegs in the years since YHF’s release. It’s great stuff, so I’m happy that it may be more accessible soon.

 

Tickets for the YHF 20th Anniversary shows are available through Wilco’s official website on February 11th (there are presales starting on February 9).

Post note: Hardcore Wilco fans, like me, will remember that they played YHF in its entirety before at their Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, MA, on June 23, 2017 (this great show is available in the Roadcase section of Wilco’s website.

More later...

Wilco Setlist: Ascend Amphitheater, Nashville, TN 8/15/21

Wilco, with friends Sleater-Kinney and NNAMDÏ, brought their “It’s Time” tour to Music City – that is, Nashville, TN, on Sunday night. The only notable change to Jeff Tweedy and Company’s setlist was the tour debut of “War on War,” which means that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is getting more play these days than their most recent album, Ode to Joy.

 

So here’s what Wilco played at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater last night:

 

“A Shot in the Arm”

“Random Name Generator”

“At Least That's What You Said”

“Love Is Everywhere (Beware)”

“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”

“Art of Almost”

“If I Ever Was a Child”

“Impossible Germany”

“War on War”

“Box Full of Letters”

“Hate it Here”  

“Everyone Hides”

“Dawned on Me”

“Jesus, Etc.”

“Theologians”

“I’m the Man Who Loves You”

“Heavy Metal Drummer”

“I’m Always in Love”

 

Encore: “California Stars”

Next up: Wilco will perform at Salvage Station in Asheville, NC, on Tuesday night (I'll be there!).

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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 

Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”

This series has been on hiatus since late last year, but it is starting back up today with the spotlight shining on one of Wilco’s best known songs:

“I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” (Jeff Tweedy)

The striking opening track of Wilco’s fourth studio album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, has become a signature song for the band.

It earned such status by being a game-changer in terms of the perception of who the band are and were. It sounded like no other song they’d done before, yet it had the familiarity of Tweedy’s laid-back rasp for fans to latch onto.

Beginning with arguably the best opening couplet of any of Wilco’s albums, “I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the avenue,’ the song proceeds through punctuating walls of sound that seem to contain every instrument that exists, which isn’t so far-fetched as it sounds.

In a 2002 interview, former Wilco member Jay Bennett claimed to have played pump organ, Wurlitzer, two different pianos, a ‘noiz’ section (including toy piano), distorted synth, and manually re-amped drum effects on the track. It’s an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production, for sure.

“The arrangement of it evolved over a long time,” Tweedy told Martin Bandyke in a radio interview. “A lot of the pieces that kind of come and go, and the layers of noise, and just the chaos of it was an environment that evolved around the song more than something really mapped out initially. I think over time, the shapes started to emerge more.”

Midway through production of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jim O’Rourke was brought in to work with Wilco on the material, in particular this troublesome track. O’Rourke worked wonders on the song, weaving the sonic sections back together into a compelling albeit intermittently noisy narrative. 

Despite wanting to engineer and produce the album himself, Bennett admitted to Kot that the opener had been “a freaky fucked-up song, and [O’Rourke] made sense out of it.” (Fans can—and should—consult the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos bootleg to get an idea of what the song originally sounded like.)

As the finished, O’Rourke-assisted song became the intro to the album, critics took major notice. Rolling Stone magazine’s senior editor, David Fricke, called it “a minutely detailed portrait of the singer as blind drunk. Vibes, drums, piano, fuzz guitar and bicycle bells stumble over one another like they’ve been thrown out of a bar, and Tweedy slurs his metaphors in a heavy whiskey breath.”

Pitchfork’s Brent S. Sirota chimed in by describing the “slightly disconnected, piano-led” track as being ‘delicately laced with noise, whistles and percussive clutter, like some great grandson of ‘A Day In The Life.’”

One thing that more than a few critics noted was that amid the cacophony-filled breakdown at the song’s end, Tweedy can be heard singing “I’m The Man Who Loves You,”  foreshadowing the song of the same name that follows later in the album. This doesn’t appear in the demo, or in any live version of the song.

When Wilco play the song live, it sometimes starts quietly, with a lone acoustic guitar figure; others times, it sounds like somebody has just powered up HAL 9000, as a electronic hum, ominous buzzing, and sci-fi-sounding synths fill the air.

More than a few live versions of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” are officially available: a stunning airing of the song recorded during Wilco’s May 2005 residency at the Vic Theatre in Chicago appears on Kicking Television, while another exemplary take on the song, filmed at the Mobile Civic Center in Mobile, Alabama, on March 3, 2008, was included among the bonus material on the 2009 DVD Wilco Live: Ashes Of American Flags. 

That same year, another Chicago band, J.C. Brooks & The Uptown Sound, released a cover of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” that reworks Tweedy’s abstract lyrics into pop soul come-ons.

“When I sing “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” the unspoken line, I think, is if I could,’ Tweedy told D.I.W.’s Trevor Kelley in 2002. “I can only break my own heart - I can’t break yours. I look at most songs as reminders of an idea or something that has helped me.”

With nearly eight hundred live performances in the years since, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” is a helpful reminder of an idea that few of Wilco’s concerts are without.

An excerpt of a skeletal acoustic take of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” accompanies the credits at the beginning of Sam Jones’ 2002 documentary of the same name. Watch it below.

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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