Jeff Tweedy November 02

More five-year old files from the Wilco dossier today.

This one was done for Exclaim's year-end issue of 2002, where the magazine's critics picked Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as the top pop album of the year. (Narrowly beating dark horse Spoon, with Kill the Moonlight.) The blurb this interview was commissioned for is buried somewhere in the black hole of Exclaim's current website re-design; I'll post the link when it becomes available.

Here, Tweedy isn't selling a new record or explaining its tumultuous birth; he's reflecting on the vindication of its success, even though he's too humble to play I-told-you-so.

Part of the reason I wanted to post these was because of this excellent interview in Pitchfork that ran a couple of days ago. It features my favourite Tweedy quote of late:

Pitchfork: Why do you think people consider Wilco a more experimental act than they really are?

Jeff Tweedy: I don't think they listen to enough records. I think that's probably the biggest reason. There are elements on our records that aren't on every other record they have.

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Jeff Tweedy, Wilco
November 15 2002
Locale: phone interview from his Chicago home

How did your fall Canadian tour go?
A lot of years we only get to play the coasts, the places that are easy to get to, like Vancouver and Toronto. It was really fun trip to get to go do more of the country again than we have in the past couple of years. We made it to Montreal for the first time ever. We had a tough time getting in there before. [ed note: I have trouble believing this.]

I heard about the Vancouver show, and I don’t know whether it was conscious or not, but that you split the two nights into an upbeat night and a moody night. Did you do that kind of thing often?
I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. We do, however, make a conscious effort to play two different shows if we’re playing the same city for two nights. We’re definitely going to have a lot of the same people there both nights. Maybe that’s happening less, but even for our sake we’d rather not be spinning our wheels. So we change the set every night, and that got better as the tour went on. When we move things around the overall feel of that is going to change with it, and that’s not a conscious effort. Unless we decided the night before that the crowd was really noisy and we didn’t want to play the subtler material and get talked over again, so we might throw a bunch of rock songs in. I don’t remember that happening.

When I saw you in Toronto, it struck me as an all-encompassing show: the rockers, the folk songs, the experimental stuff, the new material, it seemed to cover pretty much everything I’d want to see in a concert. Is that what you get out of the live shows?
I enjoy playing more than I ever have, and I feel like as a band that pretty much started on some shaky ground a little over a year ago – not shaky ground in that we felt we weren’t doing a good job when we went out there, but it was a big job to undertake. We were learning all the old material and the new material at the same time and [trying to] incorporate the stuff that we felt best about, which was the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot stuff and do a good job with it, which was challenging with four people. I think we were sucked into our own minds early on in tour. Basically, each of us had more musical responsibilities than we’d ever had.

Some of those shows I felt like they were a little stiff for a while. I don’t think we did too many complete dog shows. But we came home and realised that it’s a fine line between wanting to play music and playing music in front of people who are just happy to see us play music. You have to remember that we’re representing this eclectic body of work. There’s no telling what percentage of any given audience is there to see Mermaid Avenue or Being There. Maybe the last eight or nine months we looked at the main set as sticking to our guns and establish what we feel like we’re doing best right now. After that, we blow everything off and play some music with the idea that there are definitely some older things that people want to hear. Both halves of the set have been really rewarding.

If Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the most collaborative you’d been with Jay Bennett, what role does the new band play in this new material?
It’s no different than any other record as far as songwriting credits go. Jay happened to leave the band, or was asked to leave the band, before the record came out. If you look on Being There, it says ‘all songs by Jeff Tweedy’ and that didn’t feel right to me. So, because I want there to be a band sensation about recording and creating stuff, on Summerteeth it says ‘all songs by Wilco.’ It would have said ‘all songs by Wilco’ on this record if it wasn’t for the fact that the situation came up with Jay. So whatever Jay’s percentages are of any given song, it comes out reading: ‘Jeff Tweedy plus Jay Bennett,’ which makes it look like a 50/50 collaboration, which it really – that’s fine if people believe it. I’m not trying to sound bitter, and I have nothing to gain by diminishing Jay’s contributions, which were always welcomed and embraced by the band. But that’s a little misleading.

You’ve been doing a lot of improv stuff with this band, and I imagine that’s helping to shape the new songs.
When we get together, for every song we record, we’ll do at least an hour of improv and towards the last two sessions we did, we just play through whole entire reels of tape set at the slowest speed so we can get 35 minutes of music on each tape. I play through five or six songs, whether or not anyone else knows them or knows they’re coming next, and we’ve been training ourselves to improvise records with songs. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s really exciting and it’s working well. I think that grew out of the recording environment where we were doing a traditional, straightforward recording of a song and then destroying everything and improvising over it. We thought, ‘Why don’t we do this at the same time?’ It’s been really good.

In April, you expressed hope that the music would overshadow the story. At that point, the story was what most people were writing about. Now that the album’s been out so long, do you think the music has risen above the drama?
(pause). Yeah, I think so. It depends on who you ask. I’m sure there will always be people who will say that we’ll never be able to separate the story from the music. As far as we were concerned, that was over with a long time ago. For us to be able to keep playing the album in front of audiences that seem to be excited about hearing those songs, it never felt like we were playing stuff that people would rather hear us talk about. (laughs).

One of the most interesting things about the film that came out this year, was the last frame, the coda card that said that the album came out and Rolling Stone called it the best album of the year. That’s kind of a no-brainer, because first of all David Fricke’s talking through the whole movie, but because of the story and the past discography it’s kind of an obvious critic’s pick. To me, the real story is that real fans bought it and voted for it with their dollar. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it the best selling and fastest selling Wilco record?
Oh yeah, by far. It’s our biggest selling record by far. It did feel like election day when it finally came out, and in the first week it was #13 on Billboard, which is a lot higher than we’d ever been. I don’t ever remember being on Billboard, but apparently we had been. I was informed later, but before I guess it wasn’t significant enough for anyone to tell me. It was weird, it did feel like people were voting for it, and for a lot of different reasons. For some people, they voted for it because they already got it for free and they wanted to thank the band for allowing it to be out there without worrying about that. I don’t know that there are enough people who care about record industry struggles to put an album at #13 on Billboard.

I do think that something Reprise missed that makes the story look even worse, is the fact that Wilco has been touring and playing and putting out records over the years that resulted in a slow momentum, a very organic, grassroots fan base. Every time we go out – if we take a six month break – it really feels like it’s grown whether we have a record out or not. That’s something I don’t think Reprise ever saw or understood, that it’s unusual for a band without any radio hits or any huge selling records to be selling out the Fillmore in San Francisco four nights in a row. Things like that don’t seem to matter to them.

But surely it must be validating to take this kind of musical leap and have people buy it not only in the first week, but continue to buy it and love it. People I know who’d never heard of the band before love this record.
I’m really excited that a lot of new people [are there] – [but] I don’t know if validated or vindicated are words I would use to describe anything. It’s really dangerous for any of us in the band to talk about it, because it appears to be self-congratulatory in a lot of instances. A lot of times when people read things, if a writer says something they think we say them.

We’re most happy and excited that at the end of the year we feel better than we did at the beginning of the year about playing music together and about our band and the idea of our band. If any of the theories or philosophies about how we make music together were put to the test, they all survived.

We did a few signings this year, where you sit in a stupid folding chair while record store employees parade people in front of you to write your name on their CD, and it was really sweet. I actually loved it. I couldn’t name a stereotype or an idea I had of a typical Wilco fan. But if I had one, it was more than shattered by the sheer misfit nature of our fan base. Which is great – not misfits like knife-toters, but four-year-old kids and biker dudes and indie rockers or whatever.

What do you make of the intense interest there’s been in the bootlegged demo sessions and early incarnations of the record? Would you make that available on the internet?
I think it is available. I think if people look hard for it they can find it. I’ve been pretty used to that for a long time. As long as we get to have some outlet – and if we didn’t have a record label we’d have our website – to generate in our minds our official catalogue, then I don’t care if people find stuff somehow. The only way I could be bitter about demos getting out is that I know somebody close to me at some time has gone away with something and let it into the wrong hands. Not necessarily the wrong hands, but hasn’t been very protective of it. But the live thing, we’ve totally welcomed that. For a while now, we’ve embraced the taping/trading community. We let people set up mics and we’re not hardcore about photo passes or anything like that. I get pretty used to the idea that any show we play, someone’s going to have a CD of it. Hopefully it’s a good show. If not, I’m sure there’s plenty of bad music out there it can sit alongside.

If people are interested in the demo versions, would you make it available the same way you made the real album available last September? Then you can control what people here, there’s no money exchanged…
You know, there’s some talk about doing that. I’ve seen very official looking bootlegs of our demos, and there’s some stuff I still wouldn’t want to put out, even though it’s out. There is some talk of us doing our own version of an alternate Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I don’t think we’d do it as something for sale, but an official download. That’s come up recently. We’ve taped every show we’ve played over the last – well, almost every show, period. We’ve done countless radio shows over the years, and so sometime we’ll sort through that stuff and put out a freebie EP.

Any reflections on the [Wilco documentary] film [I Am Trying to Break Your Heart]?
I think [director] Sam [Jones] did a good job. I get asked about the film a lot, but I don’t feel I have much to do with it other than being its subject matter. I’m still friends with Sam! It’s weird any time any portion of your personal life – some people would say it’s not that personal – but there are definitely things in there that are more public than I ever would have imagined. I guess I didn’t really think about how permanent film is, in terms of people’s perceptions of you and the band. A little bit of that has been strange, but it hasn’t weighed heavily on the band. And for the most part, the movie’s been really well received and hasn’t done anything to take us off track.

It’s coming out on DVD soon, isn’t it?
I don’t really know, but that’s what I hear. I’m assuming someone will tell me!

Just like those Billboard conversations.
Exactly. I should really keep my finger on the pulse a little more.

Jeff Tweedy April 02

The new Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky, comes out a week today. I haven't heard it yet; I'm one of those ultra-rare breed of music fans who prefers to wait until the intended release date to hear a new album (unless I'm writing about it, obviously).

But I'm ready to jump back on the bandwagon. I loved the Jay Bennett trilogy: Being There, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but when I heard the druggy mess that was 2004's A Ghost is Born I was frustrated with the whole who's-in-Wilco-this-week game and ready to give up hope. Maybe Tweedy did need Bennett after all; I was never an Uncle Tupelo fan, and the Bennett-free Wilco debut, A.M., continues to gather dust on my shelf.

That all changed with the 2005 double live Kicking Television, the first Wilco album to feature guitarist Nels Cline. There, the Ghost songs came to vivid life, and the back catalogue never sounded better, thanks to the fully confident, conflict-free new line-up. I put it up there with my favourite live albums of the last ten years (Lyle Lovett's Live in Texas, Rheostatics' Double Live), and the show I saw last year at Massey Hall bolstered my born-again relief with the new Wilco. They're certainly the only band I'll tolerate that many guitar solos from.

I've interviewed Tweedy twice, both for the same album--2002's artistic and commercial breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Once was when the album first came out, and once when Exclaim picked it as its top pop album of the year in November. This is the former conversation, conducted for this Eye article.

At the time, all anyone wanted to talk about was Jay Bennett's acrimonious departure, and the record company drama that saw the band getting dropped and then... well, I don't have to tell you all that again. But I wanted to talk primarily about the music, because that to me was more interesting than any behind the scenes drama.

First, though, a quick story about the first time I heard YHF.

I'd heard that it was noisy and somewhat experimental--certainly weird enough to get them dropped by Reprise. I picked up an advance copy from Eye's Toronto office and was driving home to Guelph. I put it in my portable CD player, which was hooked up to the car stereo with one of those cassette adapters. Driving up the 427, opening track "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" unfolded beautifully, and I was immediately enchanted with how the abrasive soundscapes were interwoven with the acoustic folk song and surrealist lyrics.

As the song collapsed towards its conclusion, I heard a sharp blast of white noise. Interesting, I thought. I can see why they got dropped. I waited to her any kind of rhythm or alternate texture to emerge from the white noise, but it never happened. Somewhat bewildered, I listened to this static sound for about ten whole minutes before I realised that a bump in the highway had jerked out a connecting cord, and in fact I wasn't hearing any sound from the CD at all, but something entirely arbitrary--which was somehow fitting. After that introduction, the rest of YHF was easy listening in comparison.

And an interesting note about this conversation: Tweedy doesn't admit that the radio signals that give the album its name were lifted directly from The Conet Project. Wilco were busted for this, and had to pay up--which funded a new pressing of this fascinating cult recording.

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Jeff Tweedy
April 9, 2002
Locale: Horseshoe Tavern

How do you feel right now that the album is finally out: is it relief? Frustration? Vindication?
I definitely haven’t been frustrated. When the record comes out it will be a relief. We’ve moved on. The whole time we’ve been working and playing and recording and doing another record and doing records with other people. We’ve been really busy and using the time. The current line-up and the way we all feel right now is the way I’ve always pictured a band to be. We’re really communicating well and really supportive and have a lot of energy to work at it. We’ve definitely rehearsed more than I have in any other band in my life.

Why do you think that is?
There’s more excitement about it, and it’s more satisfying to rehearse when there are things that are changing and getting better. There are visible, tangible things happening.

New blood?
There’s that, but Leroy’s been with us since Summerteeth, he just wasn’t in a lot of the pictures. And Glen and I have been playing together for a couple of years now in other projects and doing things. We all know each other really well. It’s more unified all the way around. There doesn’t seem to be contrasting agendas that were problematic in the band for a period.

People talk about this as a departure, but it seems more like a progression both thematically and sonically.
The way our records are, every one of them could be looked at as a departure by somebody. I consider that a compliment. I want each record to be a departure and its own thing and identity and create its own universe. But at the same time, we aren’t reinventing our entire musical language every time, that would be ridiculous and hard to do.

On Being There, there is a lot of lyrics dealing with dreaming and escape. On Summerteeth, a lot of those dreams turn nightmarish and there are a lot of darker themes, and on this one that dreamstate takes a sonic level. I don’t know if that’s just my own theory or…
No, it’s a great one. Honestly, I don’t know how conscious we are of all the different things that come out in people’s imaginations on our records. I think we do our part to try and be creative and then invest a lot of ourselves in making something has a feeling. My concerns? I’ve changed a lot, but maybe a lot of my basic concerns haven’t, as a person. I’ve always been curious, musically. And lyrically, rooted in a relationship with music that is maybe the prime source of spirituality in my life. It doesn’t surprise me that those things could come out.

I think this record is the least interior of all the records I’ve made. Rock’n’roll was the main subject of Being There, but in a very interior life way, introspective. Summerteeth was someone complaining about their personal problems in Niagara Falls or something, in this sonic environment that’s so ornate and glorious but sort of synthetic at the same time. This record is more relaxed, more space and more patience and more concurrent commentary from the music about what the words are. Cohesive. That’s the only thing I can honestly say that I think we’ve become better at. Overall, for whatever reason, I like this record the best.

You use a lot of keyboards to achieve that effect here. The only electric guitars are either squalls of feedback or the Lou Reed-like solo on “I’m the Man That Loves You.” Were keyboards a more appropriate way to capture that mood?
I write a lot of songs on acoustic guitar, and those are at the core of the songs for me. I have to play them and feel like I’m communicating a song with just voice and guitar. But whenever I’m imagining songs, since Being There, I always picture piano voicings and voicings you can’t reach on a guitar. That’s exciting to me, because they elevate it out of pure folk song status and I like seeing what other environments happen. Pianos and keyboards are something I’m completely naïve about, but that I’m also most excited by.

Do you ever write on keyboards?
I’ve written a couple of songs on keyboards. I come up with parts, but I can only really play with one hand.

The opening song “Break Your Heart,” which on the one hand isn’t that much more strange or disorienting than “Misunderstood” or “Sunken Treasure,” but the fact that there are all these swirling keyboards and melodic drum parts – I wonder if there was an intention in placing that song first on the record, as kind of a throw-down.
Aside from Summerteeth, where the first song…

Was commissioned?
It was commissioned, but it was something we liked and we put it on because it didn’t disrupt the flow of the record that we had already sequenced and made and were happy with. And we liked the idea of starting with almost a theme song, and it was conceptually validated or rationalised. I don’t feel like we compromised ourselves in that experience, which has been pretty well documented. I like the idea of opening with orchestra bells. But in general, we try to open with the most compelling track to open the doors, whatever opens the door the widest to the musical universe we’re trying to create.

That one kicks it down. In that one song are all the possibilities of the entire record you’re about to hear. I also love the final bleep at the end of the song’s deconstruction, it’s almost like, ‘Are you pissed off yet? Here’s one more!’
(laughs mischievously) Yes, that was quite misanthropic.

Reading about the history of this album over the last year, it’s somewhat frustrating that all professional discourse about the album’s release or music in general is a history of opposition in order to make a good story: “This is the record they didn’t want you to hear!” And that discussion also paints audiences into a tribalist, anti-pluralist niche. Does that ever get frustrating, or do you just try to rise above the noise?
I just try not to be too concerned about the fact that I, like everyone else, have a really narrow perception of time. There’s no way around that. If this music, if any music survives from this culture, this past 150 years or whatever will be looked at as the rock era. Even in a couple of months, I know that this will be the story told about this record – being turned down by a record company – and I understand how compelling that story is. It’s a good David and Goliath story, there’s a lot of things about it that are interesting. But I also know that it won’t be that interesting in a couple of months, I don’t think, it will be a footnote. Maybe the record won’t be as interesting to people after they hear it. But maybe it will transcend all that. I don’t have any control over it. The world defines those things. I’m happy with our record and that’s all I can ask.

This is also the second time you’ve had a film crew document the making of a record. Is that distracting?
The first time was weird, because it was this commissioned thing that Billy Bragg was paying for. His wife produced it, and when I saw the movie I thought it was really strange. There’s no real explanation why we’re there. This time around we allowed ourselves to be the subject matter of this guy’s movie, and he was really excited about that. We thought he was a really great photographer, and if nothing else it would look beautiful.

How did it effect work in the studio?
When it was an interview situation, it’s hard not to be self-conscious, and I think we overcame that most of the time. But in the performance area and in the studio, I didn’t think about it at all. If I was thinking about it, then I wasn’t doing my job.

Have you seen it yet?
It’s not done yet, so no. I’ve just seen little clips on the website.

What does the title of the record mean? There’s a European woman’s voice intoning it over the end of “Poor Places.” Is there any significance to the phrase? [as noted above, I later learned it's from The Conet Project]
One of the things we’ve been interested in doing since Being There is finding random elements. “Misunderstood” is almost all random elements. We filled up an entire reel of us jamming in the key of D, just noise, and then played the song as a ballad with piano/acoustic guitar/ vocal, and then played them both back and that’s what happened. We tried to keep ourselves excited by doing stuff like that, undermining our authority over the creation of something. Recognising that cooler things can happen without any profound intentions. Something always happens when you put a random element over something. Whether it holds up over time, you have to be the judge of that. That track had morse code and radio transmissions through the whole track. At one point it became obvious that it was the cool part of it, where it really worked, and we left it there because it was like she named the record. “She” – it was probably a machine.

With all the line-up changes, what is John Stirrat’s role in the band exactly? Is he an anchor for you?
John’s roles are he plays bass, sings background vocals, and has ideas and parts for keyboards and guitars and we collaborate on a lot of levels. We haven’t figured out a really efficient way to collaborate on the songwriting process, it’s been more in the recording process. John’s huge to the band in that our sensibilities are complementary and I trust hearing things with him. It’s amazing how important that is: even if he didn’t play a note on the record, how important it is to have him around the studio. I think we’ve tried to acknowledge things like that, whether or not everyone played on a track, whether or not everyone helped me write a song. The songs are made and produced by Wilco, and that’s why I feel that way. Everyone helps create the environment, which is just as important as the act of it.

I understand most of Wilco are on the new Autumn Defense album.
I just played on a few tracks, and everyone else was involved too.

I’m curious what the difference is between that and Jay Bennett wanting to do his own thing.
I don’t think Jay Bennett wanted to do his own thing until he was aware that he was out of the band. There’s something very different about it. I get the sensation that one of the ways John has really grown is by sticking his neck out and finding another outlet for his songs, and it’s one of the things that hurt Jay in the band, that he had never done that. Whether he admitted to himself or not, he wasn’t really sticking his neck out in that way. Better to ask him, because I’m speculating.

I don’t think he would have been so quick about [releasing his solo record] if it wasn’t for the fact that he wasn’t in Wilco anymore. In that sense it seems a bit more commissioned to me, like something to prove. And not to make judgements on Jay’s contributions to Wilco – I think he was always embraced in the band and acknowledged as a major contributor in different periods in the band and elements of the band’s growth. But it’s not what you did: it’s what you do. There are loyalties that exist in friendships and music. Loyalty cannot supercede passion. You can’t tolerate indifference playing music with people. It’s also an unfair situation to put people in, in a group dynamic, who have agendas that revolve around maximizing credit, being given credit.

Now, I’m speaking very diplomatically. But there’s a lot of credit I can’t give other people, even if I wanted to. And even if it was the truth or accurate, it would be impossible for me to do that. If I said, ‘Jay, why don’t you sing and write every song on the next record.’ The reality of the situation is that a lot of people for a long time would say, ‘Why did Jeff say “you sing…”’

It would be like the last CCR record.
Yeah, right. I wish him nothing but the best, and I’m really happy that he’s finally made his own music and done it and I hope that he does well. But I see a very distinct distinction between John’s solo work and Jay’s. I hope Jay’s evolves into something that – and this is just my interpretation of it – that is more purely motivated.

A lot of bands reach a certain level – I don’t want to say plateau – but they master something they’re good at, and then they embark on a process of unlearning, unravelling, letting things go. Did that inform this record as well?
I don’t know. We’ve either never gotten so confident that we’re good at something, or we have an inability to remember how we did something, or we have a real curiosity and passion for finding new ways to be exciting. I admire bands like CCR who can do the same thing; they were more of a singles band, though, not albums. Or like Jay Farrar. I admire that he does his thing and he’s confident in it, and his latitude has maybe expanded recently, but it’s still very confident and secure in its foundation, in what he does. I’ve just never been that type of person or artist. I’m not compelled to approach things that way.

So there are about three or four things coming out soon, including the soundtrack to that film [Chelsea Walls] you did with Glen…
The soundtrack comes out the same day our record comes out, which I’m not very happy about. If I can avoid giving them any press, I would avoid it because they’ve been bastards to me. It’s a work for hire, I understand that, and I enjoyed doing it, but the album is the mixes for the movie and I was never given the opportunity to mix it for the album, which is very different. I’m a little dissatisfied with that, and also dissatisfied that they’ve seen the opportunity to be as crass as they have been in trying to piggyback it: ‘Oh, everyone already has [downloaded] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, let’s put this out.’ I don’t think it’s going to matter.

The only people who have ever treated me like that are independent labels, isn’t that interesting? Reprise, you can say that they were completely forthright: ‘We’re a big business, and this isn’t a big business record.’ Fine, fair enough, that’s your decision to make.

But Glen, Jim O’Rourke and I made a record last year that should come out this summer on Drag City. Scott McCaughey made a Minus 5 record with us as the band called Minus 5 Down With Wilco, and that should be coming out later this year. Glen has tons of solo stuff he’s putting out, like minimalist drum-oriented records that are really cool. The new Autumn Defense record is shaping up really nice. Everyone in the band is really engaged and inspired musically. It’s a very exciting time.

[we wrap up, and I give him a couple of Canadian albums, including Royal City's Alone at the Microphone, which I describe as being part Wilco, part Handsome Family]
Oh wow, thanks a lot! That should be amazing, then. Well, the Handsome Family part, anyway.
Listen, I certainly don’t want to tell you what to write, and it’s obviously your article to write whatever you want. The only thing I ask respectfully is that I don’t really care to have a lot to say about Jay’s departure and his record. I know I just gave you a bunch of quotes about it, but feel free if you see necessary. I personally don’t want to get involved in it that much, in any kind of dispute. I understand people are interested in it, and there’s always a lot of speculation around this band. ‘Jay’s the Svengali behind the idiot savant Tweedy’…

Have you heard that?
Oh yeah, I’ve heard all kinds of things like that. From Jay in interviews. ‘I wrote this song, I wrote that.’ I don’t want to participate in all that, and that’s why I’m being diplomatic and I’m just asking you to be sensitive to that – if you can at all. If not, no grudges would be held at all. I certainly gave you enough information.

I’d rather dwell on the record, to tell you the truth.
Well, thanks very much.

-end-