HOW TO BUY
Wilco
The progress of a great American band – via Chicago.
By John Mulvey.
Warehouse party band: Wilco, 2005 (from left) Glenn Kotche, Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgenson, Jeff Tweedy, Pat Sansone, John Stirratt.
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THE LAST TIME this writer met up with Jeff Tweedy, at a 2019 show in Brussels, the imminent release of his band’s eleventh album was giving Tweedy cause to ponder where Wilco fitted in. “One of the things I think is strange about my [current] antipathy towards rock music,” he considered, “is that it’s happening at the same time as I’m becoming more confident Wilco is a rock band unlike any other still walking the earth. Does that make us a dinosaur? No, I think it’s definitely valid.”
It’s a curious, self-reflexive way of praising your band, especially when that band have been routinely lauded as one of America’s best for the last 25 years. But perhaps Tweedy’s questioning of what it means to be a rock band, and what a rock band can be, has been crucial to Wilco’s brilliance for a quarter of a century.
Over 12 studio albums, multiple side projects, hefty box sets and a busy live schedule, Wilco’s ubiquity has been rooted in their deft, subtle way of avoiding cliché and expectations. To some, they are a cornerstone of the Americana movement, however uncomfortable they’ve sometimes been with the tag. To others, they are the much-vaunted “American Radiohead”, worrying away at rock convention with a restless desire to stretch the form. A natural successor to R.E.M., or to the Grateful Dead? Wilco accommodate it all, taking their place in a great tradition of American rock bands while playfully subverting that tradition as they go.
“Wilco is a rock band unlike any other still walking the planet.”
JEFF TWEEDY
Success has not always felt guaranteed, however. When Tweedy formed the band in 1994, it was his old partner in Son Volt, Jay Farrar, who was widely expected to have the more significant career. Wilco’s progress for a decade was one of incremental triumphs achieved in the face of daunting challenges, both personal and professional. Their second two decades have been less tempestuous, with a long-stabilised line-up, but no less creatively rewarding. Hence the challenges of this How To Buy: a band notable for their consistent excellence, in perpetual musical flux. “[The Beatles] were pushing to express themselves in ways they’d never heard anybody express themselves,” said Tweedy in 2020. “That’s basically art. I want to try and find that.”