![]() On this record, I felt like I was just going for it and the band was playing with a lot of confidence - and at the same time felt confident and free to let it all hang out. People are a lot more apprehensive about criticizing things they don't understand. I've learned that to say something really directly and understandably allows people the latitude to take whacks at it. The idea that those two records represent a certain amount of coasting is absurd to me, "Sky Blue Sky" in particular. There's a lot of critical shorthand for all the records, but especially the last two, which I don't agree with at all. Do you agree with the critical shorthand for "Sky Blue Sky" and "Wilco (The Album)"? The album is bookended by two epics, and stuffed with four-minute garage raves and slow burners - it covers more stylistic ground than the last two albums, which received more of a mixed reaction for their restraint or traditionalism. Let's do this.” At one point we were still going to work on the other version and call it “All of Almost,” but this song became such a focal point for us that I think we forgot about finishing the other version. That's when everybody could see, “Well, this could be something completely different. I didn't even sing it we just moved it in the computer, flipped it around and just said “Hey, let's see if this works.” It fit really well right off the bat without a whole lot of editing or manipulating. I don't know, I had this impulse to hear what the lyrics and the melody would sound like over it. Well, at some point Glenn (Kotche) and Mike (Jorgensen) started playing this vaguely Germanic drumbeat. So what's a typical happy accident like from "Art of Almost"? We're all pretty open to the process and excited about what could happen. Nobody comes in really demanding a song end up a certain way. We could have taken it in the most literal direction at the beginning and it would maybe sound something like a mid-tempo Neil Young-type song, but the band has an openness to accidents, or not being too precious about songs. I had a song on an acoustic guitar I played for everybody and we learned the chords - those are roughly the same chords that are still on the record. So what do you go into the studio with? How does a song like that begin, and when do you start to know where it is going? Let's make it a totally different texture." It's very rewarding to work that way and make a real studio-sculpture-type collaboration. After that, we could all envision where it could head and where it was going - it was just patiently, collectively, coming in weeks apart and saying, "We're going to nail this outro now" or "Let's make sure the sound cloud that the vocal emerges from is rich enough" or "The third verse sounds much too similar to the first verse. A few things happened pretty early on - like the drumbeat and the bass line, the pulse of the song - and that became the core. "Art of Almost" started as a completely different song, and through a hodgepodge of approaches and accidents, we ended up with this collage that we spent months and months and months refocusing our eyes on, adding parts and taking parts away. Would you walk through how a song that tricky comes together in the studio, what the process is like as you build the soundscape? "The Whole Love" opens with a classic Wilco epic, the seven-minute "Art of Almost," which careens through a half-dozen different pieces and styles, along the lines of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" or "Bull Black Nova" from earlier albums. And while Tweedy took exception to this characterization in our discussion last week, it's the band's most challenging and thrilling effort since "A Ghost Is Born," an arty and accessible album at once familiar yet full of new ground and fascinating left turns. It's the band's eighth proper album, and the first to be self-released on Wilco's new dBpm label. ![]() Wilco's latest, "The Whole Love," is out today. Go ahead, try and name another songwriter who started getting better with his seventh album. ![]() When Wilco emerged from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo some 17 years ago with the sturdy, catchy roots-rock of "A.M." and "Being There," it would have taken a special imagination to see that Jeff Tweedy would become one of the most daring songwriters of his generation - and that Wilco would become a vital, adventurous band breaking new stylistic ground with each ambitious and creatively restless album.īut Tweedy's devotion to his craft was such that after four Uncle Tupelo albums and two Wilco discs - despite crippling migraines and an addiction to pain pills - he had a mid-career blossoming unlike any other in American popular music.
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