Spend an hour in the company of Jeff Tweedy and you would still need only one
hand to count the moments of pure, unguarded relaxation. This, however,
might count as one.
“It took me years to work out what went into a great pop song,” he says. Then
comes a brief pause, in which Wilco’s frontman realises that such talk may
inadvertently raise expectations for his own band’s new album, Sky
Blue Sky. “But even if I know the recipe it doesn’t mean I have the
ingredients. The way I see it, Abba made Dancing Queen and, from that
moment on, every musician who has heard it faces the struggle to come to
terms with their own imperfection.” It’s not as though he doesn’t have a
point. At the same time, given that Tweedy is a 39-year-old man from Chicago
and Abba were, well, Abba, you half expect such a statement to come with the
mischievous twinkling of an eye. In fact, the singer is just getting
started. “ Dancing Queen is just so glorious. After some time I
have finally figured out how to play it on an acoustic guitar. If nothing
else, it means that Abba and I can share just a little common ground.”
Getting Tweedy to admit that he has made his most accessible album since the
sprightly aberration of Summerteeth (1999) was never going to be
easy, but his opening utterance is as near as we might get to a tacit
admission. What was once an aversion to categorisation has, in recent years,
become closer to a fatal allergy. As the years go by, those who have met him
on previous occasions learn from their mistakes. Those who haven’t lob terms
such as “experimental” or “rootsy” his way and feel slightly embarrassed
when Tweedy holds forth on why, actually, the opposite is the case.
It doesn’t take too much psychological excavation to find the cause of this
condition. In the early 1990s, Tweedy formed Uncle Tupelo, and jump-started
the Americana/alt.folk vanguard. It wasn’t meant to be this way, he
maintains. “It was more that, after you get punk out of your system, you ask
yourself how to write a song. And one way to start is by writing songs you
hear the easiest. Invariably that would be like a Woody Guthrie or Hank
Williams song.” By the time Uncle Tupelo recorded their final album in 1993,
the superb Anodyne, Tweedy felt like an imposter. He didn’t know what
Wilco was going to be when he started trading under that name. The years
since then suggest he still doesn’t. To this day, there remain
Tweedy-watchers who gauge each album according to how much it sounds like
his old band. Wilco’s 1995 debut A.M. fared well in this
respect. But by the time Yankee Hotel Foxtrot appeared in 2002, he
had strayed beyond any recognis-able roots-rock comfort zone. Febrile
meditations such as Radio Cure prompted their record company,
Warners, to drop them – only for Tweedy to stream the entire album on the
band’s website. In doing so, he kicked off a buzz that propelled Wilco from
theatres to stadiums. And, in a deliciously ironic twist, the American
Radiohead (as they were now touted) were signed up by Warners subsidiary
Nonesuch.
To Tweedy, the hitherto unexplored musical detours all fed into a truer sense
of who he was. Country music was something his parents had listened to but,
as a child, he shared his elder brothers’ taste for leftfield Krautrock
pioneers such as Amon Düül and Kraftwerk. “Was I considered unusual by my
peers? I don’t know if that was the only reason people considered me
unusual. The records were probably the least of it.”
If his brothers had been two or three years older they would have been
fighting for territory on the same cultural battleground. But as the
youngest by ten years, he was indulged by them.
“One time,” Tweedy recalls, “my brother switched colleges and brought all his
stuff home. When he walked into the house he found me filling out a Columbia
Record Club questionnaire – one of those promotional things where you get 13
albums for a penny. He ripped it up and said: ‘Look, I’ll just leave my
records here.’
“It was actually very enlightening and exciting to have access to this world
that wasn’t available to me, a world beyond mainstream radio.”
I suggest to Tweedy that, years later, it must be nice for his brother to
correlate that early act of generosity to the effect that it had on his
musical development. On the other side of a thoughtful pause, Tweedy chooses
his words carefully. “I haven’t had a chance to be very close to him for a
long time, because of alcohol and addiction. So I don’t even know what
credit he’s aware of.”
Tweedy himself knows a thing or two about addiction. He has been teetotal for
more than a decade, but harder to deal with is the struggle with the
painkillers used to control his severe migraines. It was presumably in a bid
to convey to the wider world how those migraines felt that Tweedy recorded
one song from 2004’s AGhost is Born. Much of Less Than You
Think is a wordless eight-minute hum of temple-throbbing density.
Tweedy’s memories of the sessions are also coloured by the depression from
which he was suffering. Once the album appeared he said good-bye to his wife
and two children and checked himself in to rehab. When he came out, his most
immediate worry was that of having to revisit songs that, emotionally,
stemmed from an intensely troubled place. “I was in such a dark state of
mind when it was happening. Then a month later, when I had finally gotten
healthy, that record ended up feeling like I wrote it to myself ahead of
time.
“I was making significant changes in my life, so I had to ask myself: ‘Are
there going to be songs that I don’t want to sing any more because they
remind me of how bad I felt?’ Actually, it was a pleasant surprise to
encounter these lyrics that were comforting to me and said a lot of things
that I couldn’t have understood before I had gotten better.”
Tweedy was also bemused to discover that his problems had been reported in the
nonmusic press. “I didn’t mind it, because it didn’t feel like it was really
about me. It could have been anyone. I just happened to provide a certain
set of circumstances that fitted into a preexisting template that the news
needs. I mean, I’ve never gotten so much press in all my life.”
Speaking on the phone from his Chicago home, Wilco’s drummer Glenn Kotche
commends Tweedy’s determination. “I’ve got nothing but admiration for what
he has done. To go through that you have to face a reality that you can
never go back to that place. I don’t mean this as a putdown, but he had to
grow up a little bit.”
Five years ago, Kotche’s arrival in Wilco was deemed emblematic of the group’s
detour into more experimental waters – Kotche is one of America’s foremost
leftfield percussionists. But Sky Blue Sky is by some distance the
most straight-ahead songs album of Wilco’s collective life – and it’s
a development that the drummer is swift to embrace. “I think that in the
past, Jeff got inspiration from different places, and in hiding the truth a
little bit. But there’s a directness here that has benefited the songs.”
The directness is, indeed, startling. Had Elliott Smith survived to beat his
demons and then sent his band packing he might have divined a song as
exquisite as Please Be Patient With Me. Songs such as Sky Blue Sky and
What Light have a folksy warmth that recall the best work of Tweedy’s
old band. “I survived,” he sings in the former, with childlike fragility.
“It’s good enough for now.”
When you’ve just made your most beautiful album and your most reconciled
sounding album, whither the cliché about genius and pain? It’s a topic that
Tweedy has had plenty of cause to ponder. “What was that quote about great
art?” he smiles, “Younger artists sit around and wait for inspiration,
while the rest of us get busy. I’ve been pretty busy lately.”
— Sky Blue Sky is released by Nonesuch on Monday. Wilco
play Shepherds Bush Empire (0870 771 2000) on May 20 and 21. www.wilcoworld.net.
From margins to mainstream
R.E.M. The guitarist Peter Buck said it best: “We’re the acceptable
edge of unacceptable stuff.”
RADIOHEAD Proof that introspection and experimentalism is no barrier to
world domination.
FLAMING LIPS Odd-rockers are now as doted on as Kylie.
JOANNA NEWSOM A Marmite voice and classical harp a barrier to the Top
Ten? Not any more.
