Chinese Apple

Here's Louis CK performing in the 300 yr old Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre at an invitation-only event in Beijing last Sunday. Looks perfect for Wilco...

http://www.thebeijinger.com/gallery/Louis-CK-Comedy-Show

The 2010-04-02 Wellmont Theatre version is very pretty. Jeff says it's probably the "quietest song in the Wilco catalogue." Then he gives out some "free dinner" vouchers.

Yes, I remember reading that show reviewed and feeling envious. I think he also said the only song possibly quieter that that was Dash 7. I can't seem to find any recordings for that show, though.

I'm comparing the solo version to the full band version.The drumbeat and bass line definitely give the song thrust. So lovely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6cxNR9ML8k

Of course, my dear. All in good fun. No hard feelings. I'm obsessing over another song today.

And apologies if I offended with my rude junior high innuendos about probing annals of the mind, etc. Don't know what came over me. I'm just in here hiding from an impending deadline.

(I think I need to pay my therapist 90 dollars to talk about my compulsion to always have the last word...)

Have you tried not listening to it seriously?

Clever!

Clearly you always win at this, Atticus.

I think if you request "I'm the Man Who Loves You," chances are good that they will play it!

Well, I stand corrected!

I guess it has been played live a lot more than I thought. :-)

Thanks for the tips on the different live versions -- it will be an aural feast. I'm going to put them end-on-end in a playlist. The structure of this song lends itself to a periodic binge.

I request it for every single show I attend, but I know it's never gonna happen

Listen Pillowy, you're not alone. I'm with you.

I've requested that song many times. I know it is not concert friendly and will never get played because it is super quiet and sleepy. I guess I've request it repeatedly because I want the song to get "votes" in that huge Wilco surverymonkey database of songs that fans love.

If the song were a person it would be the quiet shy girl who is beautiful on the inside, but never gets asked to the dance. Only released on a free EP for crying out loud -- never got the recognition it deserved.

I've just downloaded the 2003 solo show Anthonyc007 suggested. Really wonderful, in lieu of actually hearing it live.

I may have been over-confident in my own ability to filter out some of the sillier things I read on this thread. But seriously I cannot listen to that song now. It came up on random shuffle today and i had to skip.

I think there is something insidious about reading verses hearing something in conversation because reading is done in your own minds voice. I hope I can restore the song after enough time passes, or maybe if I get to hear it played live in the near future. (Going to all three Italian shows in October. Yay!)

Best case scenario would be if Jeff intros the song and says for certain it is not about jugs or drugs!

Perfect! Thanks a bunch. :-)

Has the song "More Like the Moon" ever been performed live? If yes, does a recording of that performance exist which can be shared?

This song has been ruined by y'all -- I can't listen to it now without having to consciously dodge thoughts about drugs and sexual deviancy. It was definitely more enjoyable for me as a simple ode to domestic abuse.

Sometimes this board is a disservice to Wilco...

Let's move on lest we delve too far and touch a nerve. The gloves may come off then!

Not that I am not intrigued by Atticus's interpretation -- the annals of his mind certainly deserve further probing!

Like I said -- all art is Rorschach... It's not about the song, it's all about you.

Occam's razor, buddy. No need to put yourself through the mental gymnastics. The guy (and I'm referencing the speaker in the song, of course, not JT himself) enjoyed pulling some tubes. I'm surprised he didn't figure out a way to work "grip it and rip it" in there.

 

Certainly no problem here with a song about pot, but I'm a little more concerned with the not-so-subtle reference to recruiting others (climb aboard) to inject drugs (tracks of a train's arm) and float away. Leave the heroin songs to Son Volt, dude.

So maybe the "hit" in the last line could be a different kind of hit than I'd originally imagined.

Dammit. This sort of makes me want to listen to the song backwards for hidden meaning...

I honestly have never given a fuck what songs mean. I put no time into thinking about it. When the lyrics are obvious as to meaning, okay. When the lyrics are not obvious, okay. I just enjoy the song or I don't. I never really think about it. I probably don't enjoy music as much as others. Oh well.

That is pretty much how I watch porn. I never really listen to the dialogue or pay attention to any sort of narrative or structure unless it is obvious, and I think it quite ENHANCES my enjoyment of the works. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

There is clearly specific intent and meaning to many of Jeff's lyrics; however, it was so interesting to have him reveal that in writing some of the songs on The Whole Love (I Might, in particular) the lyrics grew out of grunts and the words just fit the rhythm of the song ("the sunk soul with the coal clean toe is a mutha!" WTF!!). That's the beauty of many Wilco songs to me -- a particular phrase may jump out at me as utterly gorgeous, but it doesn't necessarily have to tell me a story for it to hit me in all the right places.

And I read in the Atlantic that he wrote the words for Born Alone this way:

In Greg Kot's tome "Wilco: Learning how to Die", Kot says that most of the songs on Summerteeth were inspired by books Tweedy was reading at the time: Henry Miller, William H. Glass, and John Fante.

"I would write tons of stuff in my head, and forget. Some songs on Being There, I don't think I ever wrote any lyrics down ... To fight that, I started writing words on paper and making up melodies to go with them. By writing things down, and putting more words into my head, it put more words in my mouth when I turned on the tape recorder to sing." (Tweedy)

Wikipedia references Kot's book that Jeff's relationship with his wife Sue inspired several of the songs on Summerteeth, and that she was portrayed negatively. "Miller was reluctantly willing to give Tweedy the creative license to write songs, but was concerned about lyrics such as 'she begs me not to hit her' from 'She's a Jar'."

Obviously, the man has many muses and many approaches to songwriting. Artists in any medium, from Robert Frost to Hemingway to Picasso or Monet, "self-mythologize" about their creative approach. I bet they don't actually have a formula that will guarantee "success." They put their work out there never knowing how or with whom it will find resonance, but they feel a compulsion to put it out there. (It's not unlike Tourettes. Fuck.)

Some people are just blessed; they have a gift. Or if you read and believe in Malcolm Gladwell, you just have to clock 10,000 hours and you can become a genius at anything.

I'm a little wary of over analyzing things I love. Like vivisection, dissecting something to see what makes it live, and killing it in the process. But I enjoyed reading your analysis of this song, which I also love.

I have always interpreted this song to be about a physically abusive relationship. And I think it is clever how the "punch" comes at the very end, in the very last line "she begs me not to hit her."

I think in some of the best Wilco songs (which is just about all of them), there is an alchemy that happens with the melody and the lyrics, a WonderTwinPowersActivate, if you will. In this one for instance, the slow and loving way the first person narrative is delivered is poignant to the narrative. I remember listening to it for the first time and being shocked and a little horrified when the last line came that it could be a song about physical abuse. And yet I love the song -- it parallels and illustrates artistically why some women stay with their abusers. I return to the sweet melody again and again despite the initial lyric horror, and now I anticipate and expect the punch to come at the end, without flinching.

Some other songs where the melody echoes the theme in the lyrics for me, include More Like the Moon. That song conjures perigees and apogees. I love listening to it on headphones in the dark on continuous repeat because it will cycle seamlessly, and swirl around your head and you will feel like it orbits around you, a satellite of love.

Or Pieholden Suite, where the revelation of infidelity is delivered feet-dragging, sweet and slow and so feels like a betrayal, because what the listener expects to be whispered is not what comes. But then with the recollection of happier days (in the beginning we closed our eyes...) the melody changes tempo and key. Well, it is just perfect.

Great masterpieces of art have an element of the Rorschach in them, where our interpretations tells us as much (or more) about ourselves as they do about the artist's intention.

The only thing that slightly marred the performance for me was the over-zealous use of the fog machine. Could hardly see the band! Definitely could not see Glenn for parts of it. Ireland has naturally occurring mist, especially in the evening after a sunny day, so IMHO extra fog was redundant.

Sorry, I was too much in the moment to take notes. Maybe someone more sensible will provide a set list. It was fabulous though. Short but intensely marvelous. They played (not in this order) Art of Almost, I Might, Whole Love, Too Far Apart, Laminated Cat, Spiders, Shot in the Arm, Monday, Heavy Metal Drummer, I'm the Man Who Loves You, Via Chicago, Born Alone, Impossible Germany...

Almost no banter except for a remark about the gloomy weather, an intro to Too Far Apart (first time to be played in Dublin), and that it was Mr Jorgensen's birthday today. JT promised that they will be back to Dublin soon.

No encore. He sped off in a black Mercedes with tinted windows straight off the stage, while the other band members were whisked off in a black van.

So happy they came back to Dublin. It's been too long!

Wilco will go on just as the sun goes down (at 21:47), and there will be some sun and light rain (expect rainbows) throughout the day. There's rain expected most of the weekend, so It's going to be muddy in that well trampled field!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2964574/extended?day=4

I guess I'm glad it will be a short set so I don't have to be standing out in the mud and rain too long.

Are you Irish? If so I presume you know what the Ticket is and that it's aimed at the general public.

The article is also aimed at shifting tickets for the festival. This ain't an interview in Mojo or Uncut.

I am "naturalized Irish", came here initially against my will (for love), but these days I've developed an ersatz Stockholm Syndrome and consider this my home. I have high expectations of the Irish Times. I really want them to be on par with the New York Times or Washington Post. Ms. Murphy may have been writing for a free supplement, but she is still on the Irish Times staff as a entertainment writer. It's not like she is some rookie reporter.

If you're looking for a bad article try the one in Hot Press this fortnight that's interviewing Jeff.

Now they are exclusively a music magazine, what's their excuse?

Yikes. I will brace myself... Thanks for the heads up!

To be honest, I think I am just still hurting from the short set Wilco will play at the festival, and wanted a scapegoat. It's not even that they will play fewer songs, but that there would be less time for banter, which is partly the fun of seeing them live.

I'll get over it. Imma bring my own party to FFF (leveraged friendships and made people buy tickets to come) and am looking forward to the weekend. Woohoo!

(Mr. Darlington, I am curious if you are associated with the FFF. You seem to get all of the first scoops before they are officially announced.)

I don't think it's so bad. Other than the apparently non-ironic usage of the "ashes" cliche. I like seeing Jeff confronted with the genius thing. Humble geniuses are cool.

Yes, FIVE people she knows consider him a genius. Whereas I assume the other 1300 people of her facebook friends do not. When I read that line, my immediate thought was: damned with faint praise. I would have laughed too if I were a Grammy award winning musician whose record has been considered one of the 100 best in music history by various publications, who has a huge cult following. I would laugh not out of modesty, but as a meta-chortle that implies "how interesting that this little lady's five friends appoint themselves as arbiters of genius."

Anyway, I find the Irish Times generally limp and insipid as a national newspaper for a country that has so many Nobel Prize winners for literature, I guess it is not so surprising that most of these Nobel Prize winners only hit their stride when they left the country.

Of course it is good journalism to reiterate some background, ie. Uncle Tupelo, but she should have done a little research. She should have read five articles previously written about the band and realized that "from the ashes" was probably to be avoided as a lead in to Uncle Tupelo. There are at the very least 47 other ways to say it.

Maybe I will start a new thread to explore other ways of phrasing, so journalists can have a ready list as a go-to for those days when they are under deadline pressure.

Other fun things to do in Ireland if you are in town for the weekend before the closing Wilco set at the Forbidden Fruit Festival...

If the weather is nice, the Bloom Garden Festival in Pheonix Park (Europe's largest city park):

http://bloominthepark.com/ I'm not great at gardening, but they always have fantastic artisan/organic/locally sourced food and beautiful Irish crafts there. I love it!

Another great musical offering that weekend is the Rory Gallagher Tribute Festival:

http://www.goingtomyhometown.com/ in Donegal. Donegal is fabulous -- a lot of literary types and artists from all over Europe end up there no doubt finding inspiration in the the ruggedly beautiful landscape and quietly friendly (and sparse) population. The Donegal coast also attracts surfers from around the world for the waves. The water, carried by the Gulf Stream from as far away as Mexico, is unexpectedly warm.

And the Listowel Writers Week in County Kerry is also worth checking out: http://writersweek.ie/ Some of Ireland's best writers will be there. And this year they are adding song writing and comedy writing to the program. Sounds fab.

The weather has been wonderful the last week or so. And for now the forecast is looking pretty good (dry) for next week too.

Badly written article in the Irish Times.

http://www.irishtime...4316645587.html

She waits about 100 words before launching the "ashes of Uncle Tupelo" trope.