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Who says great music only comes out of pain? Jeff ‘ Tweedy is in a better place than ever before and Wilco . have made an album filled with optimism and hope. :1 Doug Johnstone reckons it makes them the perfect * 4r Indian Summer festival headliners
ilco are an important rock band. Not
just entertaining, although they are
often ass~shakingly so. Not just innovative and intelligent and experimental and heartfelt and unpredictable and honest, although they are all those things. No, Wilco are also a highly important band, both in terms of the music they make and their forward- thinking attitude towards the music industry.
Of course, that’s maybe a stupidly grandiose thing to say about any bunch of guys with guitars, nevertheless it holds true for the Chicago-based six-piece outfit. Centred around the creative focus of frontman Jeff Tweedy, Wilco have, over the last 13 years and six studio albums, essentially consisted of an ever- rotating line-up of musicians, although recent years have seen that line-up settling into a close-knit band of musicians dedicated to both delivering moving, sublime rock music and quietly confounding expectations at every turn.
The latest example of this gentle subversion is studio album number six, Sky Blue Sky. Following on from the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2002 and 2004’s A Ghost is Born, both of which were heavy on experimentalism and deconstruction, what could be more subversive than a seemingly simple collection of beautiful and sumptuously warm, country- flecked tunes? Some fans and critics have been disappointed by Sky Blue Sky’s directness, its lack of boundary-pushing, but that’s to miss the point.
Both Wilco’s previous two records were dogged by band infighting as well as Tweedy struggling with chronic migraines and a subsequent addiction to painkillers. A spell in rehab has seen Tweedy emerge a changed man, and his newfound clear-headed attitude is reflected in his daringly direct lyrical approach. While Yankee Hotel Foxtrot began with the poetic but oblique lines, ‘I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down
the avenue’. the new record kicks off with ! being afraid to follow these paths that we
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‘Maybe the sun will shine today/The clouds will blow away/Maybe I won’t feel so afraid’. It’s a change of direction indicative of a man no longer content to hide behind obfuscation.
‘I love poetry, but I’m more concerned now with language working than necessarily having it be poetic,’ he says. ‘This record was gravitating towards more direct statements, and it felt like that was the most shocking. alive and frightening thing I could do. I always think with lyrics that you’re onto something good when you feel a little bit uncomfortable with them. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like simple words required a certain amount of courage, more than writing a lot of obscure and cryptic lyrics.’
The music follows a similarly brave path. While previous records jarred their way into your consciousness, making you sit up and pay attention, Sky Blue Sky sounds like a rich. seamless whole, something that hangs together as an album, rather than just a collection of songs. The album was born out of long jam sessions in the band’s Chicago loft rehearsal room, and it’s clear from listening that this is a bunch of musicians really clicking.
‘Everybody feels really connected in this line-up,’ says Tweedy. ‘And that contributes to the kind of record we’re able to make. Sure we had our preconceptions before going into this record, but we tried not to cater to that, and were very successful at allowing whatever was going to happen to happen as well.’
This holistic approach is something John Stirratt, bass player and only other original member of Wilco, wholeheartedly agrees with.
‘Musically there’s a lot of communication going on,’ he says. ‘With this record, when we worked, we worked long hours. But we got a lot done. There was more jamming, we would originate songs just by riffs that would stretch out. Plus we were a bit more prone to going with the thread of whatever we were doing, not