wilco

You should read his follow-up book How to Write One Song, it's full of exercises to stimulate lyrical inspiration.

Self xp - christ, that reads like a man discovering what has been up-front and centre with Wilco for about 20 years. Worse, it reads as an apologia for a shy conservative. Eck.

Moments when you feel you're going mad (and possibly the last to know. Again.): when you play Star Wars on Spotify, the time bar is a lightsaber.

“Charlie’s fixin’ his band with the left-arm tan”
Jeff’s note to self to get a better drummer

hmm, I thought it was "van?"

Doh

Or is it “fixin’ Japan”

he's fixing his van, which he drives with the window down and his left arm hanging out ... getting tan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhmMb5jKItY

new album cousin out sep 29

i guess this is supposed to be the 'experimental' album they were working on around the same time as cruel country? i don't really hear that in the single, it's pretty restrained

produced by cate le bon? huh

Has the fandom affectionately nicknamed this album “Cos” yet

Pretty great cover image.

Surprised the title isn't an oblique reference to their music being used in every other episode of The Bear

lol was going to say the same thing.

i guess this is supposed to be the 'experimental' album they were working on around the same time as cruel country? i don't really hear that in the single, it's pretty restrained

Yeah, this is definitely more restrained than I expected, but the choice of Cate Le Bon as producer gives me some hope for the full thing. I know Tweedy was also tossing around "art pop" a lot wrt to this album when Cruel Country came out.

Can’t get into the new song. It sure does trudge along.

cruel country was so good, really looking forward to this. new song is p lovely imo

heavy george harrison vibes

it's breezy and fine but nothing exciting

boring

oh this is their psych album but it's really sleepy

can definitely hear cate le bon's contribution as producer but her bad trip vibes get reduced down to a milder underlying unease

Few sentences are more of a bummer re a Wilco LP than “All songs written by Jeff Tweedy.”

Sorry, Jeff, but you need to open things up a little.

This album certainly has a vibe but there isn’t enough to grab onto somehow, and looking over the discography I realized that the last time this band really IMPRESSED me - really, really impressed me - was Star Wars.

this album's filled with kinda interesting textural ideas but in service of songs that are barely there at all. complete opposite of cruel country (which i think is much better). nothing close to "bird without a tail/base of my skull" either

but i'd still take this one over some of their lesser albums like ode to joy, schmilco, wilco (the album), even the whole love outside of the bookends

important final clarification lol

maybe these songs will be cooler live if they let nels shred all over them

that's generally the case with wilco songs tbf

Definitely at least a cut above the albums ufo mentioned. Wish someone would impose a ban on him writing songs in first position on the guitar, or something

i think it's pretty good, certainly the best in a few years

I agree that Jeff needs to significantly shake up his songwriting somehow. This has probably been true for 10 years but it gets more true with every album.

If they can't make a great album with that band and CLB producing, guess what the problem is?

Not working with a producer that will push them further?

idk his songwriting was the best it'd been in a long time on cruel country and so it's a shame that hasn't carried across to this one

and le bon has clearly pushed them a bit here, just tweedy is back in sleepy/plodding mode so it evens out to just being ok

I haven't really listened to the last few, but I do feel they need someone to push them out of their comfort zone. Like, an *active* producer. Like, hell, get Alan Sparhawk to produce *them*.

I'll still catch their shows, which are great, but I definitely lost interest in their albums a while ago. I kept a few gems on each, but The Whole Love and Star Wars are the last ones I might want to play in their entirety. A Ghost Is Born is probably the last great album they've done IMHO.

they should get sparhawk & bj burton in

I haven't really listened to the last few, but I do feel they need someone to push them out of their comfort zone. Like, an *active* producer. Like, hell, get Alan Sparhawk to produce *them*.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, September 29, 2023 3:17 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

feel like you're making assumptions that Cate Le Bon wasn't active

I haven't heard it yet! but I would say active enough that it's not boring. assuming it is.

You can hear her on this record, but let's be honest, it would take a pretty strong producer to push Tweedy around at all.

The new album is fine. Just don't get how he's more prolific than ever but his vibe is so lethargic

he's got unlimited access to a free studio space near his home. and he has time. he goes there every day and writes another song by himself, with his friend / studio manager hitting record. there's nothing at all to push him in any sort of interesting direction or force him into any sort of urgency, etc.

the other guys in the band contribute to the arrangements, but by that time the song is pretty much set - especially the vocals and vocal melodies, which imo are the biggest issue with Wilco songs right now.

i am somewhat speculating here, but to me that sounds like a pretty direct path to the rut he has been in for 10 years now.

idk he wrote some pretty solid stuff on cruel country so if they just took a more self-consciously arty approach to the arrangements again with some of tweedy's stronger, more direct songs then that could be quite decent

apparently the songs on this one weren't all written together or anything though, tweedy got le bon to dig through a bunch of demos & studio outtakes from the last 10 years and pick out songs to work on. it sounds like some were more recent songs that they'd been working on before they got side-tracked with cruel country, but some date further back.

oh see, i didn't know that part about le bon digging thru the archives. i guess by "somewhat speculating" i mean "talking out of my ass" :)

i agree that Cruel Country contains strong material ... it's just too long, imo, but if they'd kept it to 12ish songs, it'd be a post-YHF high point.

i didn't either, i just read a bunch of recent interviews because i was curious. they gave le bon a lot of control over the shape of the arrangements too

idk what i'd cut from cruel country though, it's definitely longer than it needs to be but there aren't really any obvious duds

maybe what we need more of from them is exploratory jams like "bird without a tail"

They were still writing and playing with teeth on Star Wars, I guess that was 8 years ago but I had given up on them kicking out the jams again when that came out and proved me wrong. “Cold Slope” is top ten Wilco for me I think.

Star Was is indeed fantastic, seems odd that the Schmilco half was was the most blah thing they've put to tape

That's for sure - it's like they decided to put out the interesting stuff first, and if people like it, maybe they can put out the boring leftovers as a holding pattern.

that’s bullshit imo, schmilco is full of great songs and bizarre shit

i understand why ppl think it’s boring, it’s a much calmer and subtler palette, but it’s pretty much just as wacky as star wars, just from the opposite angle

I haven't heard the new album yet, but... Unlike most everyone I genuinely think all of their/his albums have at least a few high quality songs. The vibe has definitely gotten sleepier and staid as he's gotten older, and its understandable why most people would interpret that as Jeff running in place creatively.

However, while the artistic "shifts" are subtler, I still believe I could distinguish near every album from one another if you were to play me a random song from side B that I hadn't listened to in a few years. And they still sound like Wilco and no one else, and I'm not sure who you could point to that sounds a lot like them making music today, and that suggests to me that they still have a unique sound that is mainly due to Jeff's songwriting and their undeniable musical talents (Glenn, Nels). I'm not going to pretend his songwriting is anywhere near as good as it once was, but I'm perfectly happy to listen to a new Wilco album every year or two even if 75% of it is just ok.

Great post Indexed, I think there's a lot of truth to that.