The Salvation of Page McConnell

With a new band, album and lease on life, McConnell reflects on Phish's breakup, his newfound songwriting and what it's like to be a leader of his own group.

Page McConnell wants to talk about his new solo album, about his new band, about his life. But what Page McConnell also wants to talk about, almost three years to the day after its announced breakup, is Phish.

It’s unavoidable—the elephant in the room for any rock star who has moved on from a band that first defined him to a solo career, and life, of uncertain destiny. For McConnell, though, it’s a little different, considering his view that no longer being in Phish has changed him and opened doors into himself that stayed closed for the 20 years he was part of one of rock music’s epic experiences.

“I don’t think I realized until after it was over, how much to me, personally, I was Page from Phish,” McConnell says, three days before his 44th birthday, mostly ignoring his beer at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “Doing this project, and now getting out on the road—all of these things have really been steps of me sort of getting back to whoever it is that I am, to who Page McConnell is, post that phase in my life. The hard part in a lot of ways is just accepting that—that I am this singular person and not a member of this giant tribe running around the country.” 

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Bringing It All  Back Home

Jeff Tweedy & Wilco go back to basics with Sky Blue Sky

Photos Jay Blakesberg 

Chicago feels sprawling. One moment dense, the next sparse, as various levels of construction seem to pervade the cityscape anywhere you go. Wilco’s studio and homebase is located on the third floor of an unassuming block in an unassuming building in the working-class neighborhood of Irving. Across the street is an all-encompassing discount store with a steady trickle of people. Out front, an elderly Hispanic man in a wheelchair nonchalantly sells traditional Latin music from a makeshift rack. It’s doubtful if anyone I’ve seen in the last 15 minutes has ever even heard of Wilco, let alone cares about its new album, Sky Blue Sky. I hit the buzzer marked Foxtrot.

The Loft is a fairly expansive space filled with all things Wilco: loads of guitars, keyboards, organs, drums, antique amplifiers, various pieces of sci-fi looking analog recording equipment and memorabilia on the walls. There are two desks with a bunk bed above them, perhaps places for the band members to abscond for a quick power nap during recording sessions or rehearsals. There’s a kitchen, a full bathroom, some couches, workbenches. On a vintage record player tucked away in one of the several aisles of equipment sits Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. It’s apropos, as this version of Wilco—call it 3.0 if you will—is a return to form.

“In a lot of ways Blue Sky Blue was like a first record for me,” says bandleader Jeff Tweedy, sitting in The Loft’s kitchen. “In reality, it was a first record. It was the first record for this lineup outside a live record.” Tweedy pauses, glances down past the Formica table we’re sitting at and resets his eye contact.

“I really grew up in Uncle Tupelo, playing with Jay [Farrar] and Mike Heidorn in an environment I thought was ideal. ‘These are my best friends and I get to make music with them and it’s kind of a collective. I write songs, Jay writes songs and we work really hard and that’s great.’ When that ended, I really thought I wanted to recreate that. I went about it in ways that I think people trying to do that, do. I tried to be inclusive. I think I wanted that feeling my whole life, to have my best friends in a band with me, have everybody feel like they’re committed and invested in what they’re doing, everybody feel like they’re contributing something to a collective pursuit. I think all the changes that have happened throughout Wilco’s history have somehow led back to that original idea. For as much as Wilco has changed, that original idea has stayed the same.”

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189 Most Memorable Album Coversof All Time

Introduction by Anthony DeCurtis

When George Harrison released All Things Must Pass, his first post- Beatles solo album, in 1970, the cover of the three-vinyl-LP boxset was a serene black-and-white portrait of the quiet Beatle sitting on a stool on the lawn of his newly purchased mansion, Friar Park. Hair and beard grown down to the middle of his chest, Harrison sit  surrounded by statues of four gnomes—widely interpreted as awry comment on his former band. He is dressed like a farmer; behind him the trees on his property seem to recede into infinity. Fully half of the LP-sized cover is sky. It is a beautiful, simple statement of what Harrison’s life had become. Inside the box, folded into sixths, was a huge poster of Harrison in his home.

When the album was reissued to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of its release, its CD-size art work, about twenty percent the size of the original, told quite a different story. Beyond the reduction in scale, the sepia-tinted cover had been brightly colored in. The grass and trees were green, the sky sky-blue. The earlier cover had rendered Harrison, the grounds, the trees, the sky—and the gnomes for that matter—all in the same rich tones. It was a vision that seemed somehow to reflect Harrison’s spiritual beliefs, a suggestion that somehow all things were connected.

Confessions of Love, Lust & Violence

Photography by Ian Pittock

Lucinda Williams is a little distracted. She keeps popping up from her seat, perched between the four overstuffed pillows that arearranged artfully on her azure blue sofa in afamily room bordered on one side by a massive television, a white brick fireplace and a bank ofbay windows that don’t overlook any body of water, despite the claim that this small tranquil suburb is named Toluca Lake. Located just 12 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, it’s lightyears away from the superficiality and brittle glitter of the entertainment hub that lies just beyond the small bumpy foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains that surround the town.

“I live here because I don’t feel that whole sort of plastic persona thing that people connect withL.A. I don’t even go over there. I’m in the Valley,and it’s much more comfortable over here. It’slike a small town. It’s like working-class, regular people,” says Lucinda, tugging on one of the small braids that jut out Pippi Longstocking-stylefrom her otherwise perfectly sculpted blonde hair. But that’s part of the anomaly and the charm of Williams. Tough but tremulous, a biker chick with an exquisitely refined aesthetic, she’s a study in contradictions, but somehow it all comes together in both her art and her demeanor. A demeanor that is so accessible and warm that fans come up to her all the time like she’s an actress on a soap and tell her about their own romantic conflagrations, explaining how songs like “Metal Firecracker”and “Change the Locks” saved their lives and gave them courage to get rid of bad men and extricate themselves from abusive relationships.

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