In my Wilco concert take on Monday, I mentioned the new Whole Love was possibly the optimistic flip side of the dark Ghost Is Born. A bonus track from the new one's deluxe edition makes the point even better.
Listen to Speak into the Rose on this Tumblr or inside Spotify Premium. (I first heard it on regular Spotify when they left it outside the pay-wall for a day. A strategic move?) Not only is the song an instant contender for best Wilco song title ever, simultaneously evocative of noir novels, clown jokes and romance, but the sound is a pedal-down instrumental drive out of the wilderness, back from where Spiders (Kidsmoke) took us, from the woods to the highway, back to civilization, loud and clear.
Wilco has almost a tour but not yet. Last night's show at Merriweather was terrific, don't get me wrong. The Sunday night was beautiful under the pavilion's hard-working Big Ass Fans, and going to any concert with hardcore music friend fans like Jim and Meghan could never go wrong. Friends Steve, Randy, Matthew, and Mary Beth were in the crowd, too, likely among many others who will surface today, and friend Mike and the NPR Music team were streaming the show live online. And after a fun and relaxed opening from Nick Lowe, Wilco gave a real good time.
But it's always interesting to see a great band at the very beginning of a tour. After finishing the album, the band has enough time to practice the new stuff into submission and determine the basic frameworks for show setlist, pacing and mood. But that's about all the band has time for. Doing some iterating on the framework? Giving it a good vetting? Tearing it up and starting over? No time. That's what the tour is for.
So, the beginning of the show attacked us with the new album (and I like the new album a bunch, so that hit me well). The middle alternated between new stuff and older material that sought the same theme — the idea that love is confusing and messy but ultimately beautiful and so necessary: One Wing, Handshake Drugs, Box Full of Letters, and Via Chicago with all kinds of fucked-up, drum-heavy breakdowns. The end of show regressed into Being There mindlessness (awesome) rocking with Monday and Outtasite (Outta mind). We left smiling and feeling the beat, recalling different moments, early, middle and late. But centered? No. Which is a point about love the new album makes, that the center is elusive (an "almost"). But I don't think the show intended as much.
Even when the middle sought thematic wins, the starting points for the songs were all over the map. The Times said the setlist approach was staking out broad territory, and I wouldn't disagree. The growth of an empire, though — even an empire that loves you, baby — is awkward.
The natural antecedent of the new material is the Ghost Is Born album, but it's a challenge to tie them together in concert. Where Whole Love examines the conflict of love and finds a positive answer, Ghost studies the same and finds ugliness and a painkiller-addled migraine. We only saw the lighthearted moment from Ghost last night, with Handshake's sing-a-long rock. But if the band is going to truly build around its fresh proposition and nail the show, they need to go there, and we need to give them time. Wilco's happiness comes easy these days, and the last couple tours have shown so. But this new material goes further, trying to explain this late happiness, and a two-hour explanation takes work.
I think you stay pretty open to what the shape of a song could be. Hopefully you’re going to be surprised and excited by what starts to emerge out of basically this raw material of chord progression and melody and lyrics. And I think if you’re not too married to steering the ship, if you just stay open to it, a really strong shape starts to emerge. And I guess in a band of six people, it’s kind of amazing that at some point we all start to see it. We all start to see simultaneously where this song is going and how it’s going to work. And then you just do your best to finish it – make it as good as it can be. But yeah, that song was like a collage or something. We worked on it off and on for several months. But I think fairly early on it took this shape that we just wanted to hone in on. I mean, I could use a really, really pretentious analogy, but I think it’s fitting: Inuit carvers pick up a piece of stone, and they start carving not knowing what animal is inside of it. And when they get to a certain point, it becomes obvious to them that, oh, they’re making a walrus, or this is a caribou or whatever. That’s kind of what I’m describing: you just get lost in the process, and eventually something starts to emerge. It’s like those Magic Eye posters. (Laughs)
Yes. Not only does Dan Sinker get a great review from Northwestern English great Bill Savage in today's Trib, but Rahm Emanuel attended his book-release party last night and — making part of Sinker's fake Rahm narrative come true — Jeff Tweedy performed Black Eyed Peas songs. Three of them, at full length. Two were sung. One was read.
To the tapers/posters of these videos, you are awesome.
Tweedy at one point says he hopes he can forget all these songs by the time the tour starts. As someone with tickets to an early date, let's hear a full-band I Gotta Feeling. Got potential if you let Nels dig in…
Outside my work these days, I'm mixed up as to which way is forward. The clarity I had last winter and spring has burned off this summer. I'd like to blame the sun or the earthquakes or the hurricanes, but I can't offer much in the way of proof. All I can figure is my glasses are under a magazine somewhere, my compass lounged too near a magnet and my view fell on the wrong side of city building permits. I have faith the glasses will turn up, and I can search how to re-magnetize a compass. But the view part takes effort. In my daydreams, the new neighboring high-rise isn't moving. Any obstructed blue or night skies are helpless.
So, to move, to go chasing those skies, I have to use what's available. The real view from this apartment is a start. With the sun pushing into the bedroom blinds early, whatever happened the day before receives a challenge. Whatever I've missed the day before bestows a reminder. There is clarity somewhere, and I've been granted an hour's loan. I've squandered everything from the day prior, but still the sun comes up.
If I was playing music in the haze and gloom, a replay comes next. The interpretation that seemed mannered and set falls apart at the bolts. I am always amazed at how quickly the collapse occurs. If yesterday the new Wilco album limned heartbreak's cacophony with interspersed and misguided bouts of hope, today The Whole Love of the title makes more sense. The discordance is not from heartbreak but confusions, and you and I just arrive in the middle of things. Those sporadic hopes are real. I don't have hard evidence, just the returns on the hour's investment.
The album's cover appears to be a dark Escher box stuffed with other Escher boxes, nearly machine-like in their interlockings, intimidating as either a maze or an engine. At the right times of day, in the right light, though, the puzzle looks almost solvable. Finish the maze or grasp the logic making completion impossible, get a spark, set the day to moving, past whatever blocks a view, onward to wherever love's clarity hides.
Lunch at the Sky Blue Sky Sandwich Company in Toronto today. Tweedy's review: "Lunch was really good, but, to be honest, I prefer their earlier more experimental sandwiches."
After he came to town, I couldn't resist the Tweedy-as-eagle poster, and then in the Wilco store, I was a sucker for a green T-shirt. Buying that much earned me a free mystery shirt of the store's choice. When the package arrived this week, the shipper clearly had holiday spirit:
The most intimate, large-scale musical moment I've ever experienced came late last night at Jeff Tweedy's solo show at the Lincoln Theatre.
After he opened with the four Wilco songs I'm most likely to sing alone on broken nights and revivalist mornings… after a gorgeously minimal harmonica on his poem to Chicago, after the song that always carries me back a decade, after my favorite of the songs I heard Mavis sing at the Tiny Desk, after freakin' Pieholden Suite, after a few mid-song flubs (on Mountain Bed, "it only has nine verses, you'd think I could do this") revealed his solitary, amused position on stage in a way that could be embraced, after he swaggered and stood to his full tallness to deliver I'm the Man Who Loves You with all the directness the song can absorb, after Stirratt and Sansone of Wilco and opener band Autumn Defense joined him on stage for a quiet but thrillingly expansive encore of At My Window, Sad and Lonely, after all of the Autumn Defense joined them in a heady, lit swing back to old alt-countrydom with Passenger Side and a near-rock, love-junky California Stars, the Lincoln stage emptied but for one and darkened. Tweedy came to the edge of the wood and without his mic or an amplifier sang Acuff-Rose, and the room held its breath.
Early in the morning, sometimes late at night,
Sometimes I get the feeling that everything's alright.
Early in the evening, sometimes in the day,
Sometimes I get the feeling everything's okay.
Of the several Tiny Desk concerts to occur at NPR since my arrival, my can't-miss show was Mavis Staples. Her coming album had Wilco chief Jeff Tweedy as producer, and he'd written two of its songs. When the first, You're Not Alone, hit Pitchfork, the song was musically strong and subtly, editorially provocative. Like Woody Allen's writing for the array of characters in Vicky Christina Barcelona, the writing was clearly Jeff, but the voice came across as almost equally Staples and Tweedy.
A broken home, a broken heart
Isolated and afraid
Open up, this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
You're not alone
In Chicago terms, as much old-time South Side as modern North Side.
At the Tiny Desk concert, which will appear online sometime (look for it here or follow here on Twitter), Staples sang that song and the other Tweedy composition, Only the Lord Knows. Same effect. Effortlessly half Staples, half Tweedy. You're going to enjoy the song when you hear it. No preaching here. It's half inside a church door and half just outside.
Then she brought out CCR's Wrote a Song for Everyone, an underrated tune (off Green River, where nearly every song is catchy-good) and a CCR favorite of mine (and also on her new album), and closed with a tidbit of the song that ensured her family's fame, I'll Take You There.
If you enjoy in any way what I'm telling you, in addition to checking out the Tiny Desk and the full album when they arrive, read Staples' recent interview with the Metro Times, Detroit's alt-weekly. The conversation is a long but wealthy one. Her on the new album's recording session:
And he had some songs that he had chosen like really classic gospel songs "“ two of them that Pops used to play for me when I was a kid. I said, "Tweedy, Where did you get these songs?" One was "Wonderful Savior," and "Creep along Moses." I said, "These songs, this is the Golden Gate Jubilee Singers; these songs were recorded before I was probably born. Back in the '30s and '40s. You're taking me back to my childhood." But I love these songs. I never thought I'd be singing these.
We started recording in December, and this was the coldest winter Chicago ever had. So he gets this idea: "Mavis we're going to go in the stairwell, we're going to go in the corridor and sing this." I said, "Not me." Man, it's cold out there. I mean it was freezing. He said, "Somebody get Mavis a cap and a scarf and a coat. Get her some gloves too."
Update: Good quote for a hot summer day, right?
I'd planned to end the post there until I woke up in the middle of the night last night… or this morning… and found Only the Lord Knows had surfaced at Staples' Lollapalooza performance yesterday. Also, Tweedy joined on stage for Wrote a Song for Everyone (video here) and You're Not Alone (video). Introducing the former, Staples says, "You know it's such a wonderful thing — we're all Chicago people. Yes, indeed."
One more thing: The Sun-Times covers the show and sits down with Staples and Tweedy. It's an enjoyable read. At one point, they talk Gaga. "You just can't sit on your butt and make Lady Gaga happen," Tweedy says. "That's more energy than I got, for sure." Team up!
