Features

Wilco: Bringing It All Back Home (Relix Revisited)

With Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival set to return this weekend, we’ve decided to revisit this cover story from June 2007.

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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 a large amount of 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.

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“In a lot of ways it 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.”

Wilco has indeed changed quite a bit since its inception in 1994, following the dissolution of Uncle Tupelo. Save for bassist John Stirratt and Tweedy, none of the original lineup remain. Since that time, four members have come and gone, the most notable being drummer Ken Coomer and multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, whose departures are reflected in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which chronicled the making of the band’s acclaimed 2002 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

When we spoke three years ago about the follow-up to Yankee, the jammy, stripped-down a ghost is born, both Tweedy and Stirratt felt like the band that was assembled with guitarist Nels Cline, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone—the same incarnation as now—was going to stick.

“There were times in ‘99 when the earlier incarnation was hitting its peak, that rambunctious energy that band had, this band has got it but more,” said Stirratt at the time. “I’ve never wanted to move so much onstage.” While the band’s chemistry has naturally evolved, as great bands do over time, the major catalyst for Wilco 3.0 has been the addition of Cline.