For over 22 years, Chicago band Wilco has amassed a wonderful 10-album discography exploring and deconstructing rock ‘n’ roll’s many incarnations. Their latest, “Schmilco,” which is due out Friday via their own label, dBpm Records, is another welcome entry in an expansive, challenging and never complacent catalog. It revisits the irreverence of their rock-leaning 2015 surprise release “Star Wars” but also adds more acoustic guitars and barebones but complicated arrangements imbued with nervy and sometimes angry energy.
For frontman and songwriter Jeff Tweedy, who formed the now six-piece band in 1994 with bassist John Stirratt, it’s a record that was a joy to make. “I personally think recording ‘Schmilco’ was kind of as wild in the same way as ‘Star Wars’—just us having fun being fucking super sad and mad,” Tweedy, 49, tells me at his Irving Park studio called the Loft. Even though it’s his birthday during our interview, he’s more than happy to candidly guide me through Wilco’s 10-album career by focusing on one song off each release.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of “Personal Playlist,” a new recurring interview series at RedEye, in which one artist picks one song from each of their albums to talk about. Here are Tweedy’s picks, in his own (edited and abridged) words. From “A.M.” to the forthcoming “Schmilco,” new insights on Wilco’s vast discography, from classic set staples to underappreciated gems, come to light.
“I Must Be High” off “A.M.” (1994)
We recorded “A.M.” with Brian Paulson at Easley Studios in Memphis. “I Must Be High” is the first take of the first performance that we ever did as Wilco. Maybe that’s noteworthy. We had all been in a band together as Uncle Tupelo, and we played together a little bit just sitting around with acoustic guitars to learn the songs and everything, but the very first tape that we ever rolled as Wilco recording is basically what you hear on that first song on the record. “Casino Queen” on that record would be the other one I’d talk about. My dad asked me to write a song about it—it’s a real riverboat casino. I took my dad to go to the casino one time, and he said, “This could be something you could write a song about.” He basically forced me to do it.
“Dreamer in My Dreams” off “Being There” (1996)
We recorded a lot of “Being There” in different studios around the country. On the road, we would just take a day off and get some stuff done here and there, which is always sort of a romantic idea to me.
“Dreamer in My Dreams” is from a session that was going over time. Susie, my wife, she owned Lounge Ax at the time, and I was supposed to be home at a certain time so that she could go to work at the rock club to relieve her of hanging out with [our newborn son] Spencer. All of this stuff that you hear at the end of “Dreamer in My Dreams” is me literally walking out of the studio, saying, “That’s it, I’m done. I gotta go.” It sounds like it’s kind of, I don’t know, maybe staged or something, but a lot of the lyrics were pretty much improvised.
I think it was a song I originally didn’t have a lot of high hopes for—it was kind of like we were [recording] bonus material. I think we knew we had enough for an album, but we weren’t really thinking about it being a double record yet, so we were just throwing all of the song ideas out there. Some of them ended up being pretty important to the record, like “Sunken Treasure,” another one that was fairly improvised in the studio, even lyrically. I’m not a particularly nostalgic guy, but that “Dreamer In My Dreams” session was a pretty sweet moment. It’s sweet for Spencer for it to be there to hear what his dad was doing when he was a baby.
“I’m Always in Love” off “Summerteeth” (1999)
It’s the same thing with “Being There” in that a lot of the songs off “Summerteeth” are, or at least a few of them were, recorded around the country at different places. I started working at Kingsize [Sound Labs] here in Chicago for some stuff, and some of it was recorded at Willie Nelson’s studio right outside Austin, Texas. I could talk about “I’m Always in Love.” I have a very slow version of it from a cassette demo where I’m sitting on the floor with Susie playing it to her, and she keeps interrupting me and singing instead of the lyrics I was singing, she keeps singing “I’m a VIP at Horde”—the Horde festival. At the time, I had a VIP laminate or something. She was laughing at being a very important person at Horde, which is pretty funny now in hindsight. Whenever I hear the melody, even when I play it now, it’s like, “Why I wonder is my heart full of holes,” it’s “I’m a VIP at Horde.” That’s pretty much the lyrics for me.
Almost all of my songs start too slow. There’s something about allowing your brain to work to sort of hear what the next chord might be when you’re writing that I think makes things just slower in those stages. And then, just like learning anything, once you’ve kind of like got the map drawn, you can go a little faster and hopefully hear the song objectively enough to put it into tempo that’s proper for it. I think we record so quickly after songs are written that my complaint about Wilco records in general would be that, and I think this may be true of a lot of bands, is that the album tempos are just glacial compared to where they end up live.”
“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” off “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (2002)
Obviously that album is a huge part of the band because of the movie [the 2002 Sam Jones documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” which documents the band’s struggle to release the album through Warner Music Group label Reprise, which ended up dropping the band], because it’s our biggest-selling record, because of the story around the record and everything. But one of the things that never really was discussed as much as being dropped from the record label or the situation between the band and [then-member] Jay Bennett at the time was the way the record really came together. It’s not in the movie, but the album is really a result of a growing friendship and collaboration with Jim O’Rourke and myself. I really wish that that was part of the movie, in hindsight—though I haven’t seen the movie in forever. To me, when you hear the record, there’s nothing really in the movie that shows how that was done.
To me, the best example of that is “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” I already had already played with Jim and been hanging out with him and stuff like that, but that was the first one where I talked to everybody in the band and said, “Look, I want to take this stuff and go down to Soma—which is Tortoise’s studio—and have Jim mix it and mess around with it a little bit. I’ll show you what it could be.” There was a lot of skepticism in the band, not across the board, but in particular Jay, I think, was very skeptical. It was such a watershed moment, getting that mix done, and it was so exciting to work with Jim and hear the potential in these songs being expanded upon. I knew when I heard it that I had to finish the whole record with him. You can’t put that on the record and have the other songs not being mixed by Jim too—it just raised the bar. That song was a big turning point in my life and the life of the band.
“Company in My Back” off “A Ghost Is Born” (2004)
“A Ghost Is Born” in general is a period in my life where I was not feeling very good emotionally and dealing with anxiety and depression and the things that were starting to be much harder for me to function. And drug addiction was compounding that. I think that in a morbid sense, I had come up with this concept of a record as like something analogous to an ark, like Noah’s Ark or something, that I could put enough of myself into this record so that my kids would be able to reconstruct me out of it. It’s a pretty elaborate conceit artistically, but like a lot of concepts are, it was something to just hang onto to write and write around and write against this concept. That’s why there are all these animal names like “Spiders (Kidsmoke).” There was a song called “Panthers” at that time. There’s all this animal imagery on that record because that was in my head that I would populate this record with the animals that are me or something. [Laughs.] It sounds really silly now.
Even “Company in My Back” has bugs in it: “I am attacked with love, pure bug beauty,” you know. I was just trying to project myself into anybody or anything else other than myself in terms of other beings or animals and bugs or whatever. I don’t really know what else to say about that song in particular. Other than, even though it’s called “Company in My Back,” it very easily could have had another animal name if I had really stuck to that concept.
“On and On and On” off “Sky Blue Sky” (2007)
This was the current six-piece lineup’s first record of material where everybody is making up their own parts. We had already toured a lot as a band that had been kind of constructed to be able to play “A Ghost Is Born” material and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” It was pretty miraculous for six people to be able to sit around in a circle and make a record just up off the ground, not knowing the songs and just kind of hammering out the arrangements as we went.
The song on “Sky Blue Sky” that I think means the most to me is a song that never really gets that much attention and it’s “On and On and On.” I wrote it for my dad because my mom died during the making of that record. It was my attempt to write something that was comforting to my dad about losing my mom. Some people really respond to that song, but for a lot of people, it really seems to be really divisive for some reason. It’s funny, Bill Fay, who I love, I’ve written two songs that he’s really expressed an admiration for aside from “Jesus Etc.”, which he covered on one of his records recently. Both of them are songs that, if you pay attention to fan sites and fan commentary, are pretty despised, but it’s “On and On and On” and “Everlasting Everything.”
“Deeper Down” off “Wilco (The Album)” (2009)
“Wilco (The Album)” has a song called “Deeper Down” on it, which is another one that’s not a big favorite in terms of our live show or if you pay any attention to the commentary from some of our fans. But it shows how different the process is for me and how different and what is useful to me of my own work, because “Deeper Down” is endlessly satisfying to me because it was a little bit of a puzzle to put together. Every time I go back and re-learn it—I don’t play it very often—but when I do, I’m still really satisfied with it. I’m satisfied with the guitar parts and how it all fits together and the lyrical theme of it. I like that song and fuck everybody else. [Laughs.]
“Art of Almost” off “The Whole Love” (2011)
I mean, “The Whole Love” as a record, just in general, in the lifespan of this lineup is where Wilco and all the individual members of Wilco finally got the most comfortable with being in Wilco. Having a band that everyone started at different times other than John [Stirratt] and myself, it took a little bit of time for everybody to let go of the fact that they were playing some other person’s parts or that they’re coming into this thing that’s already defined or already has an audience. Everybody made really significant contributions right off the bat, but internally, the psychology of it, I think, finally faded away that, “This is us, this is our band.” And then “The Whole Love” to me is the first record where it really feels like all the different personalities are allowing themselves to be their own personalities.
“Art of Almost” is this strange combination of all the different members putting their mark on something and having it still somehow hold up and be a thing. [Laughs.] Live, it just gets kind of more and more intense. As we played it over the years, it’s gotten more monolithic or something. It’s the only song that’s the same tempo exactly every night because it’s the only one we actually play along to some backing tracks with—just because that’s one of the only songs we don’t have enough hands to really present it the way we want it to be.
“Random Name Generator” off “Star Wars” (2015)
One of the things I ended up being unhappy about with the way “The Whole Love'”came out and was presented to the world and everything, was that it really occurred to me over time that there are people that take our band way more seriously than we do. We care about it more than you can possibly know—it’s really important to us, but it’s also a rock ‘n’ roll band. [Laughs.] That seems to have gotten lost at some point because of the seriousness of some of the material, I suppose, or just an overall seriousness of some of the critiques of the band—I don’t know for whatever reason. But there was also the way that the world has changed: everything is rolled out over long, long periods where it feels standing on a mountaintop and blowing a trumpet to release an album, saying, “Don’t worry, we’re going to release the song titles now.” And there’s a press release for the artwork or whatever. That’s so stilted and un-rock ‘n’ roll.
I just wanted to for these last two records, “Schmilco” and “Star Wars,” to figure out other ways to present the band that undermined our sense of self-importance, undermined the preciousness of a rock ‘n’ roll band and allowed some spontaneity to be part of what we do. Having our own label really is the first time that’s been allowed, as we could just say, “I don’t know, why don’t we just give it away?” That was a really great moment for us. The record grew out of a lot of recordings that I’d done with Spencer for “Sukierae.” There were a lot of things that I’d already started on with Spencer, and then Glenn [Kotche] came in and played on them, and then we kind of built them up with everybody over time. But there were two records being worked on like that, “Schmilco” and “Star Wars,” and “Star Wars” was the closest to being done, so I just finished it. It was just to remind ourselves that joy is a part of rock ‘n’ roll, that irreverence is a part of it, that, I don’t know, that we’re allowed to have fucking fun.
“Random Name Generator” is just such an incredibly fun one. I don’t know if there has ever been a song more fun to play live for the band than that song. There’s just something about the relentlessness of it. I feel like my heels grow to platform boots and my pants widen to bell bottoms during the course of that song, like a shapeshifter or something. [Laughs.] In my mind’s eye I disappear into a certain amount of hero emulation, which is totally fine in my book. Even Elvis was doing that. It’s all part of blowing yourself out of your own fucking consciousness and becoming something more than you know.
“Common Sense” off “Schmilco” (2016)
I’m not trying to just be a contrarian, but I think that the song “Common Sense” is probably going to be like the least favorite song of everybody on the record. And it’s the hardest one to play. I don’t know how often we’ll actually be able to pull off playing it, because it really requires a very quiet theater to come across, but there’s something so unnerving and creepy about that recording that I really enjoy listening to it. Basically all of the parts on “Common Sense” are the craziest parts probably on any Wilco record.
@joshhterry | jterry@redeyechicago.com
