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Wilco frontman Tweedy gets intimate with new album
04/16/2007 4:59 AM, Reuters
Jonathan Cohen
The Wilco loft takes up a full floor
of a nondescript building in Chicago's Irving Park. This
expansive place could use a paint job and some new rugs, but
it's cozy in a way that makes you feel like you're in a
grown-up's clubhouse.
Several sets of bunk beds double as office space
underneath, while large road cases on wheels and shelves full
of gear occupy their own corner of the site.
Loud, unexplained banging noises come from the floor above,
while the band's road manager excitedly divulges that an
employee at the local Jewel grocery store has just set aside
multiple cases of the lime soda Wilco's members like to drink
at the loft. Meanwhile, frontman Jeff Tweedy gets comfortable
on a couch surrounded by old Wilco concert posters.
Tweedy has slept on the futon here when he's been too
immersed in band work to drive home to his wife and two preteen
kids. He recorded an album with his side project Loose Fur here
in late 2005, and he liked the experience so much that he
decided to track the next Wilco record -- "Sky Blue Sky," due
May 15 via Nonesuch -- here, too, even though it required the
band's six members to squeeze into a cramped alcove no more
than 30 feet wide.
It may sound like forced intimacy, but it's in this
environment that Tweedy feels most comfortable right now. And
it's this close-knit vibe that permeates the beautiful, soulful
"Sky Blue Sky," the follow-up to 2004's "A Ghost Is Born."
Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche,
keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and the newest members, guitarist
Doctors Without Borders, a charity the band
had specified when contacted about the initiative.
"This has been a part of their pact with their audience,"
says Nonesuch senior VP David Bither, who signed off on the
early streamings. "The audience wants to be involved with them,
and that has been evident to us." Tweedy adds, "I think most
people will do the right thing and support us and buy the
record, even if they have downloaded it."
DVD DOCUMENTARY
Fans will get an insider's peek into Wilco's creative
process via the documentary "Shake It Off," which will be
included as a DVD with the deluxe edition of the new album. "A
lot of it is the band rehearsing in the loft, before some dates
they did in November," Margherita says. "They're playing
through the songs start to finish, and there's a lot of
behind-the-scenes footage and interviews."
Further honing in on the hardcore fan, Nonesuch is
releasing "Sky Blue Sky" on 180-gram, audiophile vinyl with a
CD of the album included. "This is fairly unusual," Bither
says. "A lot of people give you download cards, but we wanted
to do something of even higher quality."
The iTunes version of the album will include the outtake
"Let's Not Get Carried Away," while indie coalitions will
receive a bonus disc with the non-album song "One True Vine"
and a previously unreleased live take of "Theologians" from the
same Chicago shows that yielded "Kicking Television."
And even though Tweedy's beverage of choice is Diet Coke
(he claimed to drink 30 of them a day on his 2006 solo DVD
"Sunken Treasure"), "Sky Blue Sky" will be Wilco's first album
to be carried at Starbucks.
Tweedy, who says Wilco has so much unreleased material that
he often can't identify those tracks when they come up on his
iPod, is already thinking ahead to the band's next album.
"We'd like to try and get something out fairly soon," he
says. "By fairly soon, I mean within a year-and-a-half or
something. The general scheme of things these days is that
Wilco spends so much time touring, and the record industry
doesn't seem to be geared toward putting out a lot of records
by any one artist quickly. So, we're battling against things
like that. But it'd be nice to do it before three years pass."
AUSTRALIA-BOUND
But first, the band is returning to the road. A run of
Australian shows got things moving in mid-April, to be followed
by a three-week European tour. North American dates get under
way June 13 in Davenport, Iowa, and include a June 17
appearance at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee.
Afterward, the band will visit Europe for a handful of
festivals. Beginning in mid-August and stretching into
September, Wilco will embark on a more extensive tour of the
United States and Canada, according to Margherita.
Rarely are any two Wilco shows the same, and concert
minutia is parsed in a variety of ways on fan sites like
Wilcobase.org. "I actually ran into a guy who put together a
compilation of the live Wilco stuff from 'A Ghost Is Born' and
it was like 105 songs or something crazy," Stirratt says. "I
couldn't believe it."
As "Sky Blue Sky" prepares to hit the marketplace, Tweedy
marvels at the turnaround in his outlook since 2004. To his
ears, the sound of the new album is the ultimate proof how all
the upheaval had positive consequences that seemed impossible
at the time.
"After a lot of complexity and a lot of reflection on a lot
of difficult topics, allowing ourselves to relish being in a
band and having the ability to make things really musical was
soothing," he says. "I think we were wanting to make something
beautiful."
Reuters/Billboard
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