WILCO is not the most successful American rock band working today, only the most storied. What’s made them so is a combination of serious musical ambition and a ready supply of conflict. As the band’s sound has absorbed ever more punk and electronic layering over its alt-country foundation, they have parted ways with a series of musicians and a record label, and pissed off many fans in the bargain. Despite this, they are more popular than ever and leadman/songwriter Jeff Tweedy’s unwillingness to restrain his own varied musical instincts has made him a cause celebre of the rocknoscenti. It’s not surprising why. Wilco’s ups and down have become the most compelling rock-n-roll narrative since the demise of grunge.
The band’s rise from the remains of pioneering alt-country fave Uncle Tupelo has been obsessively followed by fans and journalists. Last year saw the release of a documentary by musician/Wilco fan Sam Jones, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, on the making of the band’s critical and commercially successful 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. This year saw the publication of Learning to Die (Broadway Books) by music critic Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune. Both proceeded with the band’s full cooperation, and both are unusually revealing documents of what the band is like and how they make music. Most of all they reveal the fickle side of the tormented Jeff Tweedy as he falls in and out of love with a series of collaborators and band members.
With its latest album, A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch), Wilco once again proves itself worthy of all the attention and hand-wringing. Released a few weeks ago, Ghost accomplishes everything it sets out to do, which unfortunately (though perhaps necessarily) includes annoying the listener.
The first tracks alternate between pulling you close with Tweedy’s whispered pillow talk and banging your head with growling guitar solos for which your car stereo must be cranked and the windows opened to let the angst escape. At track 5 the album shifts, with possibly its best song, a fine back-porcher with boisterous piano, hammer dulcimer, and, finally with exquisite musical momentum, viola and a kazoo riding out the well-controlled rumpus. One result of the band’s experimentation in other realms is that its few quintessential songs come off with a fuzzy freshness that saves them from ever seeming like just another genre episode.
Two other standout tracks quickly follow: “Handshake Drugs,” a beautiful, prosaic rainy-day account of the drug-buying ritual. There is no bickering with the quiet, seat-shifting of a Wilco song when it’s balanced with the band’s courageously soft-spoken music. So long as the music doesn’t disappear entirely, these nudging poem-songs of everyday desperation deliver just the thing–if your thing is aching beauty. “Company in My Back” is a poem of I know not what, except the inescapable physical presence of a lover. Its slow acoustic procession picks up with catchy chorus swells of dulcimer and organ.
The album settles at this point into a state of general excellence, unmolested by the extra-musical groping of guitars played in violent interruption of melody and structure. The band’s habit of deconstructing a song as soon as it gets going is more or less restrained.
Of all the conflicts involving the band, none is so important as the band’s ongoing argument with its audience. Accused of wanting to sabotage his own songs, Tweedy tells Greg Kot that “sabotage to me would be to make a song something other than what I believe in, for the sake of commercial success. That’s sabotage. That’s contrary. I’ve never been a contrarian; I’ve never made stuff to f*** with people. I’ve made stuff because I want to f*** with myself.”
This settles the question, but not in Tweedy’s favor. As with the densely allusive quality of so many Wilco songs, the many moments of deconstruction seem to be part of an ongoing dispute between Wilco and itself. The band’s reputation for making esoteric music is clearly well-deserved. And yet, if Jeff Tweedy didn’t deconstruct his songs and dip them in random noise, as he is wont to, he probably wouldn’t be as committed to his own music. All this sonic foment appears to keep Tweedy heavily invested in his work, of which the good stuff is always getting better.
The Wilco strategy also keeps the audience invested. Jim O’Rourke, the producer for A Ghost is Born and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, tells Kot that as a performer he’s “interested in making people confused. That’s a better forum for thinking about things, because if you don’t confuse people, they just go on to the next thing.” This is the Wilco strategy in a nutshell.
As O’Rourke might have predicted, this review article would not be complete if it didn’t pause to address the confusion–or rather the discordance–of the second to last track, “Less Than You Think.” After two and half minutes of the album’s most lilting, feathery, drift-music, Tweedy sings, “there is so much less to this than you think.” The listener is then subjected to a solid 13 minutes of droning noise. In Kot’s book (which is quite good, by the way, though its occasional bouts of extreme erudition pay too much respect to the band’s most self-scholarly indulgences), the drone is glorified as a “sound installation.” To this, there is only one answer: Press the “skip track” button on your CD player.
The reward is another jaunty Wilco track to close things out, “The Late Greats,” about as fun a song as Wilco or any band makes these days. And well worth the trouble.
David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard as well as editor of Doublethink magazine.
