Wilco - Out of the roots

Wilco play a fundamental role in the contemporary music landscape: direct descendants of the great folk songbook, they represent the restless and at the same time sardonic soul of today's America, the dark side perpetually hidden behind the hypocritical smiles of the politicians in the White House. Woody Guthrie's wandering guitar echoes through their music, so much so that, with a bit of daring, they could be called the architects of the genre's last great revolution: what Bob Dylan was in the Sixties and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie Prince Billy) in the Nineties, Wilco have been for the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Folk was born as a denunciation of social ills in an America (that of the 1930s) marked by deep social inequality and growing poverty, but one that could still hope for a political change capable of overturning that dire situation; the Sixties (with Dylan at the forefront) represented a shift of that hope from a concrete, materialistic plane to an ideal, utopian, poetic and visionary one. The disillusionment born of that failure would have to wait more than twenty years before being replaced by something truly new and original, namely the nihilistic, dark intimacy of the as brilliant as inconsistent Will Oldham, and it's from here that Wilco (and in particular their leader Jeff Tweedy) set out to try to recover a comprehensive view of a world that is hard to understand but which they approach by scrutinizing their own inner selves.

The two poles of this tearing dichotomy (the inwardness of a tormented conscience and the outwardness of political matters) have always been well present in the fabric of Wilco's sound, whose songs perpetually oscillate between narcotic, dusty moments and sudden, blazing electrifications, often spilling over into pure, cosmic-tinged noise (exemplary in this regard are "Misunderstood" from Being There in 1996 and "Less Than You Think" from A Ghost is Born, 2004). Obviously there's much more within a body of work that reveals an eclecticism comparable to that of the genius of Minneapolis, Prince; indeed, it's remarkable how easily and stylishly Tweedy (author of most of the band's songs) manages to blend an innate pop gift for melody, an elective affinity for deviant, outsider country (certainly not the academic Nashville kind, but rather the one descended from Johnny Cash and Gram Parsons) and a more classically rock-oriented posture (especially that of the early Fifties and the desert frontier well expressed by Giant Sand). All of it seasoned with nods to the spirit of blues and, especially in the mid-period works, streaks of electronic infiltration that wrap the settings in a dark, shadowy haze.
But let's take things in order. The story begins in 1990, before the world had even become acquainted with the grunge earthquake, in Belleville, Illinois, where the trio made up of Jeff Tweedy, Jay Farrar and Mike Heidorn released their debut LP "No Depression" under the name Uncle Tupelo. The seeds of the future are already all contained in this work: Hank Williams and Leadbelly fused with the hardcore of Hüsker Dü to portray the sleepy but adrift life of small-town America. Just three years later, with four albums and a collaboration with Peter Buck of R.E.M. as producer behind them, the group broke up. The cause was the fracture of the relationship between Tweedy and Farrar, who went their separate ways: the latter reunited with drummer Max Heidorn, who had left his bandmates after the release of the acoustic album March 16-20, 1992, giving birth to Son Volt; Jeff Tweedy, on the other hand, carried on with Max Johnston (multi-instrumentalist on fiddle, banjo, lap steel), John Stirratt (bass) and Ken Coomer (drums) and formed Wilco.

The new band released their first work (with the addition of guitarist Jay Bennett) in 1995, and the album, A.M., marked a return to the most classic country-rock (alt.country, as it was called) with no subversive intent, though Tweedy still let his talent shine through in highly successful tracks like "I Must Be High" and "Box Full Of Letters".
It's certainly not a record one could call outstanding, but it marks an important starting point: the country conventionality found here would be continuously dismantled in the years that followed. As we'll see, the band's career can in some ways be considered a genuine manifesto, in which the rule is stated and then slowly overturned in order to bring the letter (which, as we know, kills without it) into line with the spirit — that is, to bring expressive form into line with the leader's soul.

The true turning point is represented by Being There, a monumental double album made up of no fewer than nineteen tracks, released in 1996 on Reprise Records (the same label that had worked with Uncle Tupelo since "Anodyne", 1993). The work, which best expresses Jeff Tweedy's ambitions and incredible eclecticism, opens under the banner of noisy psychedelia with "Misunderstood", where the soft, dusty piano bed is charged with hefty distorted electrification, into which the singer's screaming, resigned voice cuts, pained and sharp; moving forward we encounter the r&b of "Monday", which gives way to the classic country of "Forget The Flowers", the bluegrass of "Red-Eyed And Blue", the love-pop of "Say You Miss Me".
The second disc sets out on perhaps more muffled melodic paths, where we approach the Beatles-esque pop of "Someone Else's Song" and, through the lopsided mazurka of "Why You Wanna Live", fall into the soft embrace of "Dreamer In My Dreams", a genuine musical collage that even touches on the live atmosphere of an ideal jazz-country club. The long journey that unfolds across Being There amounts to a genealogical summary of Tweedy's musical origins, but also a first programmatic preview of what was to come, positioning itself halfway between the alt.country of which he is an outstanding representative and the roots-pop, bastardized by electronics and suffering, that Wilco would go on to create in the years that followed.

The third album, Summerteeth (Warner), saw the light in 1999, and once again it's a disorienting listen for any fan: whereas previously the reference points, though contaminated, had been sacred monsters of American music (the aforementioned Cash, Parsons and Guthrie), now the dominant attitude is that of a very English kind of pop with strong echoes of The Beatles and The Kinks, smudged here and there with roots reminiscences (often quite strong ones, it must be said). Here Tweedy gives free rein to his pursuit of melody, crafting an extremely enveloping, rounded sound, in which the strings and vocal modulations seem to come not only from England but also from Brian Wilson's California. What's also remarkable is the fact that these delicate sonic arrangements conceal lyrics of devastating rawness, dealing with themes like abuse, violence and the alienation of everyday routine.
Summerteeth remains one of Wilco's most sharply focused albums, driven by an intent that guarantees it unity and coherence; nevertheless, and although the songwriting is of a very high standard, the seventeen tracks that make up its structure often come across as predictable and at times repetitive. It must be said that at least three of these tracks belong in the pop history books: "She's A Jar" wraps you in the coils of a timeless melody, the gorgeous "How To Fight Loneliness" (the title says it all about the content) is steeped in Springsteen-like disillusionment and sadness, while "Via Chicago", which would become a live staple for the band, captivates with its shifting sonic textures.

Their third album sits between two parallel releases by the band, who in collaboration with English folk leader Billy Bragg released Mermaid Avenue I & II (in 1998 and 2000 respectively). The two albums feature a handful of songs built on lyrics Woody Guthrie had never set to music (here is the tribute to one of their mentors), set to music composed by the band themselves, and the result, though not without flaws, is excellent. The project can be considered more Billy Bragg's work than Wilco's own (as the 2001 video titled "Man In The Sand" clearly attests) but, despite this, Tweedy's interpretive power shines through in highly successful tracks like "Hesitating Beauty" from the first volume and "Remember The Mountain Bed" from the second, which strikes straight at the heart with a line full of pain and pathos: ⟦Q1⟧.
Times, however, were starting to get tough.
Guitarist Jay Bennett, due to friction with the rest of the band, left Wilco during the recording of their new album (it's now early 2001) and, as if that weren't enough, Warner/Reprise, disapproving of the new material, dropped the band after they refused to make the new music more commercial. Undeterred, Wilco bought the original tapes back from the label for the modest sum of $50,000, proving that their artistic independence comes before anything else. Meanwhile, a kind of legend began to build around this new record with such a tormented backstory (which certainly only increased fans' devotion), which circulated for a while on the internet (informally, so to speak, but with the band's blessing), before finding a home at Nonesuch, Wilco's current label and, paradoxically, itself part of the Warner group.

Finally, in early 2002, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (named after a track from the Conet Project) was released, an album that represents a further break with the past, or rather its reworking into a wholly new and original form. And it's close to a masterpiece. The opening track, "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart", is an extraordinary preview of what would follow in the grooves to come: crooked, limping pop, reminiscent of Giant Sand, but also of the spacier Byrds, electronics laid down like a thin veil, a synthesis of pain and lightheartedness, all seasoned with a smirking irony that wraps around the entire work, even in its darkest moments. "Jesus, etc." picks back up the thread of the ballads Tweedy had written up to that point, adding much more to them (Albion-esque strings and a flock of Beach Boys-like drums), "Ashes Of American Flag", perhaps the peak of the record, wanders sickly through the ashes of the shattered American dream (⟦Q2⟧), "I'm The Man Who Loves You" is the finest example of blues-pop in recent years and "Reservations" curls back up among the dusty shadows of small-town America.
The complexity of the arrangements on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is staggering and reveals the artistic maturity Wilco had reached along the path opened up by Being There and Summerteeth. Jim O'Rourke (member of Gastr del Sol and a noted solo artist in his own right) joined the band on acoustic guitar and behind the mixing desk, lending his own personality to the project's success. Expectations for the group, at this point, were huge, as was the fear that the album represented the creative peak behind which an inevitable fall was lurking. But another change of direction, with the now-loyal Jim O'Rourke established as an auxiliary member of the ensemble, was just around the corner, and it would be steeped in suffering and mental distress.

Meanwhile, during 2003, Tweedy released two albums outside the Wilco name: the self-titled records by Loose Fur (with Jim O'Rourke and Glenn Kotche) and by Minus 5, a pop collective that had existed since 1993 and was led by Scott McCaughey.

We'd have to wait until spring 2004 to get our hands on the band's absolute masterpiece, A Ghost Is Born, and the ghost the title itself alludes to seems to be none other than that of the leader himself. Shortly before the album's official release, in fact, news broke of Jeff Tweedy's psychological breakdown, and he was admitted to a detox facility due to a developed dependency on alcohol and painkillers; the migraines and panic attacks he had been carrying for years had turned him into a slave to cheap palliatives that threatened to destroy him. Beyond the obvious personal concerns, hopes for the new upcoming album, conceived and recorded precisely during the darkest period of Wilco's existence, grew ever more uncertain. And yet the surprise is great when, once you put the record on, you run into that incredible sonic mutant that is "At Least That's What You Said": the dust left in the speakers by the last track of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is still all there, in the soft yet unsettling piano as much as in Tweedy's voice, never so pained, never so immersed in such a deep, narcotic atmosphere, devoid of the creeping irony that ran through the previous record. The guitar explosion that splits the track in two, dragging the listener into a long, blazing instrumental coda, condenses in miniature the leader's tormented soul, who, far from letting himself be smothered by his own anxieties, managed to release them, generating music that is powerful and sincere, steering the chaos raging within him toward a fully realized artistic form. "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" is a highly successful foray into kraut-rock, as ever filtered through a pop sensibility, and "Hummingbird" is Brian Wilson playing out his anxieties with John Lennon and Ray Davies.

But the climax of the album (as if it needed one) is perhaps represented by the pairing of "I'm A Wheel" and "Theologians": the former smoking rock 'n' roll, the latter epic lyricism, in which a more genuine-than-ever Tweedy voices his dissatisfaction with ready-made creeds, incapable of fitting his ineffable soul; the guitar literally weeps alongside its protagonist. The cosmic, and, let's admit it, almost unlistenable coda of "Less Than You Think" (a representation of the migraines Tweedy suffered from) gives way to the record's artistic seal: "The Late Greats", a track that expresses the inexpressibility of perfection, a nod to that other thing, never present except as absence, that Jeff Tweedy has always sought, even at the cost of his own stability.

Now with an impressive run of excellent records, handfuls of unforgettable songs and ongoing sonic experimentation behind them, in 2005 Wilco treated themselves to a double live album to celebrate ten years of activity, twenty-three tracks totaling two hours drawn from shows held in Chicago. The title (Kicking Television) refers to the identically titled outtake from the A Ghost Is Born sessions, originally released on a mini-CD bundled with the European reissue of that album.

In the spring of 2007 came Sky Blue Sky, a work with more relaxed atmospheres, marked by a more pronounced compositional cohesion. Having found a better existential balance and greater peace of mind, Jeff Tweedy gave life to eleven new songs that keep their distance from the clamor of hype. Bittersweet, dreamy and poetic lyrics let themselves be carried along by music that is at times pacified and sparse (the title track "Sky Blue Sky" and "Please Be Patient With Me"), at times electrified prog-blues charges ("Shake It Off") or southern rides ("Walken"), at times Young-like rewrites ("You Are My Face") or Dylan-esque ones ("What Light"). All of it, naturally, seasoned with Tweedy's sublime pop genius, always an extra element within the band's eclectic sound (which the alt.country label has always fit poorly, and which the leader himself has rejected, as he has every attempt at labeling).
The band reconvenes with the same lineup from the tour that followed A Ghost Is Born and produced the live album Kicking Television, and the chemistry among its members is palpable, as is each one's ability to contribute to the record's success (worth mentioning are Nels Cline, a gifted guitarist with avant-garde leanings, and Glenn Kotche, whose versatile drumming moves seamlessly from restraint to power).

With the self-titled Wilco (The Album), released in 2009, Tweedy and co. chose to pause and reap what they had sown, rather than try once again to plant new seeds. Naming an album after yourself, after all, is always a statement of intent: in this case it's the clearest symbol of a band wanting to show it has gained full confidence and trust in itself. Wilco (The Album) thus sounds like the American band's most conservative work since the days of Being There: having left behind the dizzying one-two of two masterpieces on the level of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, Wilco decided to look back, summing up the stages of their journey into a more reassuring-sounding compendium.
Wilco want to have fun, to take things more lightly. The stride of "Wilco (The Song)" freely draws on the London werewolf persona of Warren Zevon, dressing it up with bells à la Summerteeth and a play of distortions, while tracks like "You Never Know" and "Sonny Feeling" revive the canon of Being There, playing with a hint of Obama-era optimism amid rolling piano, sunny vocal harmonies and the playful wink of the riffs. George Harrison and Tom Petty smile approvingly in the background.
To find the band's full depth, though, you have to turn to "Bull Black Nova", which borrows the kraut pulses of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" and combines them with an obsessive repetition of piano notes, giving shape to the murderous fantasy that opened the classic "Via Chicago" and carrying it into a tense atmosphere thick with unease, where the guitar cuts like a sharp, quivering blade: Tweedy steps into the shoes of a killer fleeing his own crime, a character straight out of some page of Cormac McCarthy's America, haunted by a guilt impossible to forget and indelibly stained by the blood he has spilled.

Despite the controversial reception of Wilco (The Album), in 2011 Wilco launched a new record label, christened dBpm, with their most solid record since A Ghost Is Born, titled The Whole Love. The prologue, entrusted to "Art Of Almost", has the more or less declared intent of scrambling expectations: a flexing of pulses more Radiohead-like than ever, unfolding over mellotron haze until it derails into one of Nels Cline's most classic electric outbursts. Disorienting, yes, but only up to a point, since at least since the days of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" it's become something of a habit for Wilco to slip a more daring track into their albums. It then falls to the first single, "I Might", to set the tone of the record, with a whirl of guitars and keyboards in which a sample of The Stooges' "T.V. Eye" even makes an appearance. That sense of weightlessness that made the tracks on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot levitate meets the melodic taste of Summerteeth, and out blooms the vividly colored power-pop of "Born Alone" and "Dawned On Me". The mood turns sunnier and even Nels Cline's guitar work shows it can find a new balance. But The Whole Love is a record with a dual soul, originally conceived as a double album or even as a pair of twin albums. So "Rising Red Lung" unspools over delicate picking, while the string curtain of "Black Moon" takes on the dramatic weight of certain pages of Beck's "Sea Change".
What holds it all together is a pop ecumenism capable of reconciling the ecstatic feel of "Sunloathe" (Brian Wilson dreamed through the eyes of Jason Lytle) with the ragtime looseness of "Capitol City". Sure, The Whole Love doesn't escape a few familiar moments, like the noisy rawness of "Standing O". But the nerve center of the record lies at the end, in the hypnotic twelve minutes of "One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)". Tweedy's singer-songwriter calling had never intertwined so intimately with the resourcefulness of his bandmates as in this long farewell. A slow unspooling of whispers where each verse reveals a new texture: now caressed by piano, now veined with arpeggios, now dotted with glockenspiel, with a twilight tone evoking the shadows of Yo La Tengo's "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out".

In 2014 Jeff Tweedy stepped out on his own with a double album, Sukierae: twenty tracks culled from a staggering trove of some 90 demos and sketches. Guitars, a bit of keyboard, some harmonies, and little else. A genuine family affair, since alongside Jeff the project also involves his son Spencer, a drummer as solid as he is wooden and predictable. No great harm done, though, as long as a virtuoso like Tweedy — without doubt one of the most inspired, prolific and talented singer-songwriters of his generation — stays in the driver's seat. It's true that father and son dig deep into their musical trunk, pulling out sharp glam rock shards, hypnotic psychedelic litanies, finger-picked folk ballads, pop nursery rhymes in triplets — but it's equally true that, in too many cases, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the few genuinely good moments from the many half-hearted divertissements on offer here.
Too many tracks spin their wheels, and the feeling of déjà vu (and déjà entendu — done before, more, and better) threatens to take over. Few things really land: "Wait For Love," which would have fit right in on a Wilco record; "Low Key," an acoustic midtempo with effected electric guitar; the hypnotic, dreamy "Pigeons"; the 3/4 lullaby of "Desert Bell" and "Honey Combed," whispered arpeggios redolent of ghost towns and hitchhiking, scented with Raymond Carver and Edward Hopper; and the Woody Guthrie-style elegy "Fake Fur Coat."
This time Jeff Tweedy chose not to care about rules or conventions at all, crafting a sketch of domestic everyday life and leaving listeners peering through the keyhole of the basement rehearsal room. The best moments of Sukierae confirm his class, his talent.

But back to Wilco: on the morning of Friday, July 17, 2015, every music outlet picked up the news that the band had just surprise-released a whole new album, which for a few days would be available as a completely free download from the group's official website. Nobody seemed to know recordings were even underway, so everything had been handled with the utmost secrecy, allowing for a truly explosive effect. Easy for Wilco to pull off something like that? Not really: a band that, on its ninth studio album (not counting live records, EPs and various collaborations), still has this much appetite for surprising people — and for having fun while having fun, because that's exactly the vibe running through these grooves — while staying fresh, curious and genuine, well, that's not something you come across every day. Star Wars is no joke, nor is it some cadeau stuffed with anonymous leftovers from storage — it's a record so brief it doesn't have time to bore you (eleven tracks, no filler, 33 minutes total of excellent music), guitar-heavy and intense (in the case of "Random Name Generator" — by the way, kudos for that title — even moderately aggressive), far removed from the melancholy troubles of Jeff Tweedy's solo debut, a work that in some ways resembles things Wilco has already done in the past, yet at the same time manages to sound different from all the American sextet's previous output.
Plenty of guitars, melodies galore, technical flourishes that are never an end in themselves but serve the song format, just the right dose of "weirdness" (something not entirely predictable happens on more or less every track) and, lo and behold, an absolute masterpiece, "You Satellite," a track capable of picking up the legacy of "Bull Black Nova" and "Art Of Almost" (their other most recent milestones), able to raise the bar once again through a tension that builds up in gradual accumulations, creeping under your skin like a lethal virus. Star Wars (though the cover features a cat — in keeping with the theme of reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable — which even blinks its sly eyes on the official website) will go down in Wilco's discography as their most Beatles-esque work ever: for instance, "More…" turns out to be as prodigiously Lennon-esque (we'd never quite noticed how much Tweedy's voice resembles the immortal John's…) as the closing "Magnetized" seems to be a child of the miraculous late Beatles sessions. But a marvel of nature in its own right is the very brief opener "EKG," which confirms the constant evolution of a band that, better than any other, knew how to bring alt-country to the world's attention, and which here decides to cross-pollinate with over forty years of music, condensing everything that's happened in rock from Frank Zappa to Sonic Youth into just over a minute. Wilco can play in many different styles — that's nothing new — and this time they range from the joyous pop of "Taste The Ceiling" to the hyper-melodic sweetness of "Where Do I Begin" (a true feast for the ears), from the effects-laden alternative rock'n'roll of "Pickled Ginger" to the surprising twin tracks "Cold Slope" / "King Of You" (essentially one song split in two), before suddenly remembering their roots and delivering, with "The Joke Explained," what can today be considered the best possible update of alt-country. Through the strategy chosen to launch Star Wars, Wilco make a definitive statement: things are done simply for the desire to do them, with no need for announcements or pompous proclamations. Fans happily thank them for the beautiful gift delivered straight to their home computers during these sweltering July days.

Just a year later, on September 9, 2016, Schmilco hit the shops, and although it came from the same sessions as Star Wars, the scenery here is fundamentally acoustic, banishing any experimental impulse — except for the noise textures devised by Nels Cline on "Common Sense" (the "track to remember" here, the only genuinely "avant" push among the twelve tracks in sequence) or the oblique angles of "Quarters," elevated by Glenn Kotche's superb drumming (besides the boss, he and Cline remain the dream team's two true standouts). If you love Wilco, once again you'll find yourself rubbing your eyes at the sublime acoustic refinement of "Normal American Kids," the velvety softness of "If I Ever Was A Child," the finely played progressions of "Cry All Day," the electric scrapes of the Beatles-esque "Locator." But looking closely, we'd struggle to picture any of these songs on a hypothetical greatest-hits collection of the Chicago band's career: neither the irresistible drive of "Nope" and "Someone To Lose," nor the measured rhythms of "Happiness," nor the refined sweetness of "Shrug And Destroy" and "Just Say Goodbye," which closes the album under a thin veil of melancholy, would make the cut. Or maybe it's simply too soon to draw hasty conclusions about songs that vitally need time to settle: perhaps, in time, they'll grow strong enough to stand alongside the band's great classics.
Indeed, Tweedy and company once again prove to be elegant, enlightened songwriters — that's hardly news: they know how to write a beautiful song, keeping that artisanal care, that attention to the smallest detail, which has helped make them a worldwide success. What's missing, though, is the spark, the lift, that decisive jolt that has always arrived not only in the band's milestones but also in more recent work — just think of "Bull Black Nova" on "Wilco – The Album" (2009) or "Art Of Almost," which elevated "The Whole Love" (2011). Schmilco, however, is saturated — and we notice this more and more with repeated listens — with germs that will end up infecting you, ready to creep under your skin: give it your full attention on headphones, grant it all the time it demands (and deserves), and you'll find yourself appreciating it as much as the band's historic milestones. Hats off to a band that keeps proving an innate knack for change while always, somehow, sounding exactly like itself, maintaining an extremely high level of quality across everything it releases. Protagonists of one of the most intense, exciting and artistically significant trajectories in all of contemporary music history, Wilco continue, with "Schmilco" — their tenth studio album (not counting those shared with Billy Bragg) — the process, begun by Tweedy back in his Uncle Tupelo days, of upgrading the modern concept of "Americana," after having already contributed enormously to bringing it into the new millennium for an ever-larger, ever-adoring audience.

2017, between one tour and another, is the year of Together At Last, Jeff Tweedy's acoustic solo album, through which he revisits some pivotal moments of his career, presented as the first in a planned series of albums heading in this direction. A kind of back-to-the-roots exercise for voice, acoustic guitar and harmonica alone, just to remind us how deep the folk roots run in this extraordinary musician's songwriting: not only the songwriting developed with his main band, but also drawing a couple of picks from the Loose Fur ("Laminated Cat") and Golden Smog ("Lost Love") projects, while leaving out entirely — for legal reasons, perhaps? — his seminal experience with Uncle Tupelo. The songs are memorable, some among the finest and most significant in the American songbook of the new millennium, from "Ashes Of American Flags" to "Sky Blue Sky," from "Via Chicago" to "I'm Trying To Break Your Heart," passing through "Muzzle Of Bees" and "Hummingbird," which helped make "A Ghost Is Born" an unmatched masterpiece.
Tweedy's chief mission — contaminating country music and making it as "alt" as no one had managed before — can in hindsight be called a complete success, and precisely for that reason Together At Last (which has absolutely nothing left of those contaminations) might end up being an album for die-hard fans and completist obsessives only. Given the amount of more or less hipster modernist singer-songwriter fare out there right now (one name at random: Bon Iver), this solo interlude feels a touch too "classic": the full-band versions remain, and will remain, preferable and recommended, even though in all likelihood all these songs were born exactly this way, with Jeff strumming out a tune on acoustic guitar. In that sense, Together At Last represents the desire to reclaim a form of songwriting that can only ever be his and his alone. Still, these eleven tracks deserve to be held tight to the heart, in whatever form, because the greatest songs are the ones that still work beautifully even stripped down to the bone, exactly like these.

Meanwhile, Wilco kept putting music out: in mid-August 2017 they released the previously unheard "All Lives, You Say?" on their Bandcamp page. Proceeds from the track (whose title references the controversial slogan "All Lives Matter," coined in response to the demands of the Black Lives Matter anti-racist movement) were donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US organization dedicated to fighting "hate groups" and providing legal support to victims of all forms of discrimination. Although never stated outright, the connection to the recent white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is fairly obvious. Jeff Tweedy chose to dedicate the song to his father, Robert L., who passed away on August 4 and had always been active in civil-rights causes.

But in late November 2018, alongside his memoir "Let's Go (So We Can Get Back)," a new Jeff Tweedy solo record arrived, WARM, featuring Glenn Kotche and Jeff's son Spencer Tweedy. Merging the alt-country tradition of his early days with the mature awareness of an unassailable status quo, Tweedy's artistic arc takes a further step forward with WARM toward redefining a dry, essential style of songwriting, solid and stripped of any kind of embellishment. This is an approach completely devoid of the sideways digressions that animated some of Wilco's most memorable compositions, but where every movement is colored with class and unmatched style, carried by a sincere, deeply real emotional pull. The opener "Bombs Above" is emblematic in this sense, built on refined dynamics and counterpoint, with pedal steel stealing the show. Other key turning points can be found in the circular harmonies that distinguish the moving "Don't Forget," another important piece in the overall lyrical design, and in the poetry whispered to a heart ravaged by devastating acoustic guitar on "How Hard It Is For A Desert To Die." From "Some Birds" and "I Know What It's Like," the two convincing lead singles destined to become minor classics in the catalog, emerges the difficulty of separating one's judgment from the unwieldy burden of Tweedy's artistic past. "Some Birds" in particular carries substantial echoes of "Schmilco."
In this new collection of intimate, painful confessions, though, there are no truly epochal moments, and in some cases one gets the same feeling as with "Star Wars" — of being faced with sketches that deserved fuller development. That's the case with the redundant, oblique mantra of "How Will I Find You?," the breezy "Let's Go Rain," and the unfinished crescendo of "The Red Brick." Despite this, WARM stands as the authentic testimony of a great songwriter unafraid to appear insecure, scared, doubtful. If in the past (especially on "A Ghost Is Born") he had already let the difficulties of complicated personal matters filter through, countering them with a passionate search for hope and trust, never before has Jeff laid himself this bare, with candor and bitter clarity ("I know it's a lie when you say it's okay," he admits mournfully on "I Know What It's Like"). Tweedy talks to us as if we were spending an evening together, watching a flock of birds (maybe the same ones from "Sky Blue Sky") fleeing toward somewhere better, while we confess to each other all the fears of being alive. And it's in the title — that WARM shouted in capital letters, already a statement of intent in itself — that the whole meaning of a simple, real, unfiltered album resides: a record meant to keep us safe and keep us feeling real.

The same "WARM" sessions yielded another 10 songs, released on the follow-up WARMER, put out on April 13, 2019 for Record Store Day.

2019 also saw the return of Wilco with Ode To Joy, which continues the process of sonic subtraction and recovers a clarity of purpose not seen so plainly since "Sky Blue Sky." An increasingly dry songwriting style is matched by the need to resist the Trumpian narrative of reality through the everyday beauty of small things, definitively setting aside the sonic vocabulary that made the band an unmissable live act.
Preceded by two singles ("Love Is Everywhere (Beware)" and "Everyone Hides"), which already deliver a certain lyrical completeness of message, Ode To Joy reveals the disarming simplicity with which the six Chicago musicians color melancholy ballads in which Tweedy's narration and voice become at times mournful and at times intimate ("Bright Leaves"), always balanced between disillusionment and the capacity to push back ("We Were Lucky"), between depth of meaning and lightness in expressing it ("Quiet Amplifier"). A record that once again delivers a consistently mature and courageous portrait of Wilco.

Then the pause imposed by the pandemic forced the postponement of an entire tour, leaving Jeff Tweedy confined within his own walls; over the course of April 2020, to stave off the desolation of lockdown, he put together new songs with his two sons, by now transformed into his personal backing band. Spencer, the elder, plays drums and — more occasionally — organ, Sammy handles vocal harmonies for the time being, while Jeff takes care of everything else: guitars, bass and, of course, vocals. The result makes up Tweedy's fourth solo album, Love Is The King, which first and foremost shows a strong country root, most evident on tracks like "A Robin Or A Wren." But, as in the best Wilco tradition, Jeff loves to ripple his compositions, enrich them with cross-contaminations, "dirty" them with pleasant surprises, as happens, for instance, through the dissonances that elevate the closing section of the title track.
Despite the melancholy and the palpable sense of helplessness typical of the moment, Tweedy does everything he can to keep Love Is The King from turning into a gloomy, shadowy record. After all, if Jeff is a champion at writing aching acoustic ballads ("Troubled"), if he knows exactly how to color them with a thin patina of electricity ("Bad Day Lately"), how to deliver excellent roots folk ("Even I Can See") and how to turn to brushed sweetness ("Save It For Me"), he also knows every trick in the book for building a perfect alt-pop song like "Gwendolyn." He therefore reaches for the brightest colors on his palette to ease the sadness and let the listener travel, even in a time when travel itself is forbidden. Tweedy makes us dream, and even picture, America's endless highways through the thoroughly enjoyable up-tempo numbers "Opaline," "Natural Disaster" and "Guess Again." And suddenly life starts smiling at us again, filling up with a world of love.

After circumnavigating alt-country territory, crossing it, dissecting it and reassembling it like no one before them, following unprecedented and highly distinctive patterns, Wilco opt for a sort of "return to their roots." Released in May 2022, Cruel Country represents the best possible fruit of the band's journey, the result of an idea gradually enriched by life experience and the awareness that comes with adulthood. A solid record, the kind Wilco hadn't made in years, with a handful of fine songs, some of which (particularly "I Am My Mother" and "A Lifetime To Find") help decisively set the overall mood, justifying a title that plays on the double meaning of the word "country" — readable both as a musical style and as a nation — a duality accompanied by lyrics that are often bitter on existential and political matters. Viewed from a distance, it may look like an essentially alt-country record, but zooming in on the finer details, enlarging the pixels of the sonic mix, reveals a multitude of valuable digressions on the theme, which make the final result stylistically cohesive yet extremely rich in dynamics and interference, where the length (we're talking a full twenty-one tracks) never becomes a weakness. What stands out in particular are the two tracks with the least conventional structure. "Bird Without A Tale / Base Of My Skull," with its gripping instrumental progression, and "Many Worlds," essentially two songs in one: the first half deeply melancholy, with piano holding the reins, the second more rhythmic, embellished by a solo that confirms the uncommon flair of Nels Cline.
On close, repeated listening, Cruel Country proves dense with cross-pollinations and rich in atmosphere. It's not a mere "back to the roots" exercise: the sextet moves naturally from the bare minimalism of "Ambulance," "The Universe" and "The Plains," carried almost entirely by acoustic guitar and voice, to the conception of "fuller" tracks that tie back into Wilco's great tradition of playing Beatles-flavored pop ("Tonight's The Day," "Hearts Hard To Find," "Tired Of Taking It Out On You"). Sumptuous sadcore ballads flow by (most notably "The Empty Condor"), as do elegant brushed moments ("Please Be Wrong") that remind us how sublime and versatile Glenn Kotche's drumming is — one of the most talented drummers of his generation. Covid left behind a desire to play together again, all in one room, something Wilco hadn't done in a while, and across these grooves you can feel that sense of closeness, the urgency of leaning on one another, to create a sound that's "simple" yet complete, this time stripped of both the electric drive of their more rock-oriented moments and the experimental streak that allowed the band to make its decisive leap in quality. Cruel Country has a comfortable sound that's never dull, traditional yet like no one else's, where the only possible comparisons and detectable influences point back to other forms of Wilco across the years — all different, but sharing one strong common denominator: Jeff Tweedy's illuminated songwriting.
The leader of one of the greatest American bands of recent decades finally proves ready to embrace that "cruel" word — country — which he so skillfully avoided for much of his career, one of the reasons he eventually decided to end his essential stint in Uncle Tupelo and head toward something alt(ernative). In interviews he has always defined Wilco — especially from "A Ghost Is Born" onward — simply as a "rock band," full stop. He's surely not reconsidering that today, but he feels the need to express at least some gratitude toward the great American folk songbook, which he adores and inevitably feels a part of, continuing to interpret it in an utterly personal and innovative way.

Just a year later, Cousin (2023) arrives as a surprise. Amid magmatic distorted waves, caressed by delicate guitars, there lurks a ticking that marks out the cycle of life and death under a desolate sky. Around that very ticking, Wilco's instruments and Jeff Tweedy's voice come together to create one of those magical musical epiphanies the American band's vast catalog is full of. In the desolation "there's nothing to see," sure — but only until the notes lead elsewhere, toward a faint glimmer, a dissonant crackle, or a low bass-drum pulse that falls in step with the heart's own beat. That's when the magic happens, and countless glimpses of existence can flicker past us like film frames. Sweet, unexpected surprises, like the track that opens the American band's thirteenth studio album. Indeed, even though it reproduces that crescendo-with-noise-scarred-climax form that Tweedy inaugurated with "Misunderstood" and kept refining until it was perfected in live performance, "Infinite Surprise" is, for all intents and purposes, something unexpected. What's completely different from Cruel Country isn't just the broad genre reference point — (alt-)country there, indie-(folk)-rock here — but also the recording process. After years, Wilco return to relying on an outside producer (something that hadn't happened since A Ghost Is Born), and although she doesn't intervene directly in the writing stage, Cate Le Bon imposes a clear change of direction on the band. Having abandoned the "live-take" recording style that had marked the spontaneity and immediacy of the 2022 album, every instrument was recorded separately, following the producer's vision each time, of course backed by Tweedy's support. This dense layering, combined with the band's typical attention to detail, shapes a dense, bittersweet soundscape rich in crepuscular shading.
From Cruel Country, however, the political weight of the material is partly carried over, particularly evident in the apathetic disconnection of "Ten Dead." "No more than ten dead," is what the radio announces after yet another mass shooting; but the death toll no longer destabilizes an absurd numbness that gets wrapped up in the band's sinister swirl of instrumentation. The theme of relationship dynamics, extensively explored by Jeff over the years, is also updated to fit the increasingly exasperatedly polarized social context in the States. And it's no accident that the album was titled Cousin, as if to express a yearning for a compassionate embrace and sympathetic listening, instead of the dull opposition incapable of leading to functional dialogue found in the title track itself.
Human relationships, including their romantic counterpart, are therefore once again the main theme of the collection. The love songs, however, deal with absence, distance, instability and insecurity. Love can be as ambiguous as in the minor-key folk of "Levee," where the ghosts of the painkiller addiction Tweedy struggled with nearly twenty years ago also seem to flicker through, or a nighttime memory stirred up by the mysterious unfurling of an acoustic arpeggio ("A Bowl And A Pudding"). The closing track tells a different story. "Meant To Be" isn't just one of recent Wilco's most beautiful love songs, but also a joyous celebration that spells out the invitation to closeness implied throughout the rest of the collection. Tweedy's songwriting therefore aims to move the listener's conscience toward a surge of empathy for what's around them, and to rethink how we interact with it. This intent shouldn't be seen as relevant only in the United States, but anywhere violence and/or indifference mark the life (and death) of human beings. Because, in truth, this isn't just about mass shootings or acts of terrorism, but also about the systematic reprisals of authoritarian regimes or, closer and sadly more familiar to us, about that vast blue graveyard the Mediterranean has become. "It's good to be alive, it's good to know we die," sings Jeff Tweedy on "Infinite Surprise," and it's a truism, only seemingly banal, worth remembering in the near future. For this reason, even though it doesn't carry the emotional impact of Wilco's finest collections, a record as attentive to atmosphere and to the chiaroscuro sides of existence as Cousin deserves to be held close to the heart.

Every year Wilco put on the Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts, which gives them the chance to invite the musicians they love most to play. In 2024 the festival ran from June 28 to 30, and the American band decided not to show up empty-handed: just a few days earlier, an EP took shape containing six tracks from the same sessions as Cousin that hadn't found room on the 2023 album. Jeff Tweedy finished the songs together with engineer Tom Schick and found just the right balance, structuring the two sides of the EP as mirror images of each other, each with two "proper" songs at the ends and a brief instrumental "interlude" in the middle.
Hot Sun Cool Shroud arrives just a few days short of A Ghost Is Born's twentieth anniversary, and in some way that album's experimental sound resurfaces within the folds of the new EP. We notice it clearly at one point during "Annihilation," thanks to Nels Cline's guitar work, but even the opening "Hot Sun" contains a brief instrumental twist during which the sextet has fun "disturbing" the song. This EP also marks the first release from drummer Glenn Kotche (universally recognized as one of the most technically accomplished and skilled drummers in the world) following the well-deserved international recognition that took him well beyond Wilco's niche, having been invited to play on several tracks of "The Tortured Poets Department," yet another best-seller from superstar Taylor Swift.
Jeff Tweedy has presented Hot Sun Cool Shroud as a summer record, and just scanning titles like "Hot Sun" and "Ice Cream" makes the setting fairly clear. But the six tracks deliver a string of surprises and a stylistic range that's usually hard to fit into such a small space. From the folk-tinged sentimentality of "Say You Love Me" to the proto-punk steamroller "Livid," from the sunny (it's fitting to say so) "Hot Sun" to the delicate "Ice Cream," there's a "tropical" feeling that comes through strongly (very strongly on "Inside The Bell Bones"). The 2024 Solid Sound Festival lineup included, among others, Wednesday, Dry Cleaning, Water From Your Eyes, Soul Glo and Ratboys; at the merch stand it was also possible to buy the first vinyl pressing of Hot Sun Cool Shroud.

At the end of 2024, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of A Ghost Is Born, Nonesuch released a monumental box set with no fewer than nine vinyl records plus four CDs (or nine CDs, alternatively), including, besides the original album, alternate versions (a torrential "Hummingbird," captured on February 8, 2002 in Chicago, stands out), outtakes, demos, plus the complete recording of a concert Wilco played at Boston's Wang Center in 2004. Also included are four full CDs of so-called "Fundamentals," rule-free jam sessions, conceptual improvisations, genuine musical experiments through which the American band was searching for a new identity. In total, the box set features no fewer than 65 previously unreleased tracks, a 48-page hardcover booklet containing unseen photographs, plus new liner notes written for the occasion by Bob Mehr, already a two-time Grammy winner in the "Best Album Liner Notes" category.
The release thoroughly documents the process of creating, developing and gradually mutating the album's twelve tracks, spanning two full years of work. The first sessions took place in early 2002 at Chicago's SOMA Studios, where Jim O'Rourke had mixed the previous "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." In 2003 the band then moved to Sear Sound Studios in New York to finish the recording, searching for further room to grow, in a location meant to break the comforts offered by their hometown. It's therefore possible to follow the complete life cycle of these songs, from their first conception all the way to their performance on stage after the album's release, when they would continue to transform. Also placed under the microscope are tracks later used on the deluxe edition, as well as song embryos that would only find their final shape in the future: such is the case of "Improbable Germany," a working title that would later evolve into "Impossible Germany." Alongside the demanding box set, a scaled-down version, limited to the first two CDs, was released in early 2025.

Jeff Tweedy somehow tries to make sense of everything, and its opposite, in 2025 with the monumental Twilight Override. Not so much to pass judgment on the many facets of modern life, but to frame, or at least attempt to decode, a widespread state of mind, especially in the hearts of those who have lived through this first quarter-century first as young people and, finally, as adults. And he does it with a triple album of a kind you haven't seen around in ages, utterly indifferent to market rules and to the supersonic pace that warps the way we listen these days, demanding superficiality and God, or whoever's standing in for Him, only knows what else.

Five years have passed since the last solo outing from Wilco's frontman. Years in which, needless to repeat, the unthinkable and then some has happened. The Chicago songwriter thus starts out from the ground, from the sidewalks where grass grows through the cracks of the world, immediately turning it into a metaphor for a desire to escape banality and immerse himself in the grandeur of small things, in the open-air miracles that are plain to see even just by walking down the street. Tweedy sings in utter solitude, cut off from everyone around him. It happens in the lines of "Parking Lot": "There's a version of me wandering around parking lots. In my brain or in my subconscious. […] Talking to other me's I don't recognize." Words whispered like a desperate crooner chasing salvation, a new galaxy. Stylistically, meanwhile, the folk-rock excursions typical of Wilco are still part of Tweedy's rich repertoire, as shown by the airier moments, like "Forever Never Ends," or the luminous descents into the abyss, between deflated chords and sudden bursts, of the splendid "Mirror."

Tweedy travels through his soul aboard a battered Ford Taunus, which also serves as the perfect metaphor for reconnecting with his approach halfway between country and vintage rock songwriting. Because “Twilight Override” is an album of pure craftsmanship. So much so that it was recorded at Tweedy's Chicago studio, the Loft, with key contributions from James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Liam Kazar and Macie Stewart. Jeff's own sons, Spencer and Sammy, are also involved, brought in by their father after listening to “Sandinista!” start to finish during a car ride with them, as he told the New York Times. Tweedy also states that the album is an attempt to overcome boredom once again by consuming darkness. An explanation that hints at a private ambition, light years away from any hypothetical aspiration to deliver the definitive triple album or album of a lifetime. It's no coincidence, after all, that, despite its thirty songs, everything flows without any strain or struggle. And between a western ballad (“Throwaway Lines”) and Uncle Tupelo-style trots (“Out in the Dark”), the ride is always a pleasant one. Granted, the lyrics often lay bare a heart in flames that refuses to give way to a rotten era and a corrupt, spoiled, obscenely repetitive society. But it's a constant shadow that, in the end, ends up casting a spell.

On this all-encompassing journey, there's no shortage of tributes to timeless idols, chief among them the thoroughly charming one to Lou Reed in “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter”, written as if Tweedy had travelled aboard a DeLorean to find himself playing as a session musician for Reed on “New York”. And then there's pacifism that truly matters, namely the Indian kind of “Amar Bharati”, (be)sung with just a few chords and a wonder that is also bliss. Dying young (“Ain’t It a Shame”), drugs as an unchanging memory (“Too Real”), love fading away as the days go by and the mind wonders about the most generic of whys (“Enough”) are “just” the last flashes of light cast into the deepest darkness by a musician never so self-assured and, at the same time, in perpetual restlessness.

Contributions by:
Gabriele Benzing (“Wilco – The Album”, “The Whole Love”)
Ariel Bertoldo (“Sukierae”)
Paolo Ciro (“Ode To Joy”)
Daniel Moor (“Cousin”)
Giuliano Delli Paoli (“Twilight Override”)

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