Albert Tatlock
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Excellent! Really enjoying Nick right now. He did a very good BBC special in concert about 2 or 3 years ago that's worth searching for on YouTube etc.
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http://www.clashmusi...-the-whole-love
Wilco - The Whole LoveAn excellent return
Album Posted by ClashMusic Mon, 26/09/2011
dBpm / ANTI
Having mellowed in recent years, this eighth studio outing represents something of a rebirth. Inhabiting a world somewhere between the emphatic organ-chug of prime Costello and the more delicate moments of ‘The White Album’, classic hooks and sing-song choruses are prominent, with two exceptions. Album opener ‘Art Of Almost’ emerges from a squall of static into something urgent and convulsing, whilst the twelve-minute ‘One Sunday Morning’ is a lolling, meditative conclusion unlike anything the band has previously recorded. The ten tracks which lie between are effortless and nimble and Jeff Tweedy seems to be a lyricist no longer at war with himself. An excellent return.
9/10
Words by GARETH JAMES
CBS
http://m.cbsnews.com...&videofeed=null
Wilco's "The Whole Love" is wholly enjoyable
(CBS/AP) Better than "Wilco (The Album"), the band's new record starts off with a blast. A sonic blast.
With a burst of distortion, Wilco delivers a sign of what is to come over the 12 songs on "The Whole Love" that span the spectrum from plaintive ballad to all-out rockers.
Diverse and yet cohesive, "The Whole Love" has more in common with 2002's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" than the band's previous two releases, especially 2009's inconsistent "Wilco (The Album)."
You can almost feel the band stretching out in the studio, breaking out the Mellotron, multiple guitars, strings and keyboards, meshing them perfectly with songwriter and lead vocalist Jeff Tweedy's lyrics.
"Sunloathe" employs Beach Boys-esque harmonies, "Capitol City" sounds like a jaunty 1930s-era vaudeville shuffle, while "Standing O" may be a little half-baked, but it still washes easily over the listener. The record closes with "One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)," an epic 12-minute heartfelt meditation that's Tweedy at his best.
CHECK THIS TRACK OUT: "Born Alone" joins the canon of absolutely chilling Wilco songs obfuscated by a rollicking backing that gets under your skin and stays there. This is not typical pop song fare, as Tweedy declares "sadness is my luxury." And it closes with this stunner: "Loneliness postponed/Mine eyes deceiving glory/I was born to die alone."
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The Daily Star - ooh err missus
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/music/view/212462/Wilco-The-Whole-Love-Album-Review/
WILCO: THE WHOLE LOVE - ALBUM REVIEW
26th September 2011
By Jim Hiscox
IN the week that REM split, the country-rockers are in a good place to take over as musos’ favourite veteran Americans.
Even after 20 years, they’re trying new tricks – check out moody trance opener Art Of Almost.
But it’s the rousing, emotional widescreen balladry they do best, and it’s rarely been better than here. It’s the perfect record to start investigating what their whole lotta love is all about.
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Glad a good time was had by all. What with the time difference I did not actually get to hear it after giving the heads up. Still, 2 nights in London to look forward too. Especially would have liked to hear NL too. I think this new release has trully reinvigorated the band and the set lists. Can't wait for next month.
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The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/25/wilco-the-whole-love-review
Wilco: The Whole Love – review (DBPM)Kitty Empire
The Observer, Sunday 25 September 2011
By the time a band's eighth album rolls around, listeners usually know what to expect. One of the greatest attractions of Wilco is their continual ability to wrongfoot expectations. They straddle the span between rock and leftfield hard places with the surefootedness of mountain goats. Periodically muttered-about as one of America's best current bands, they are a recombinant six-piece anchored by singer Jeff Tweedy. Early albums were bittersweet primers in Americana, and the band can still inhabit those heartlands. Here, graceful "Black Moon" is a minor-key acoustic ramble, lapped by lap steel. But a more troubled mid-period allowed Wilco to be dubbed "the American Radiohead", thanks to an abrupt leap into leftfield. The pivotal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) remains their best-known album.
Since then, Tweedy has recovered from a prescription drug habit. Wilco's volatile line-up has stabilised, and their music has grown more elegant. Recent albums – Wilco and Sky Blue Sky – have brokered more resolutions than they have picked fights, prompting many Foxtrot–era fans to wonder whether Wilco have lost their edge. "It Dawned on Me", one of the breezier tracks here, does actually features a little whistling. Bits of Tweedy's vocals, meanwhile, track the structure of Supergrass's "Alright" alarmingly well.
Those seeking Wilconian wig-outs should start at the beginning. "The Art of Almost" kicks off this first release on Wilco's self-run label; the title could stand as a succinct description of what Wilco do. It's a restless seven-minute opener, pregnant with possibility, mustering uneasy beats, strings, and a Krautrock work-out in which gifted guitarist Nels Cline scrawls outside the lines with glee. At the other end of the album is "One Sunday Morning", an unobtrusively lovely 12-minute lop that offers a kaleidoscope of emotions surrounding a father's death, delivered in Tweedy's matter-of-fact rasp. We're ushered out with ticks, rustles, plinks and the merest wail of lap steel.
In between, Tweedy cleaves closest to the chipper end of his repertoire, contrary to his contrarian reputation. "I Might" is the sort of unabashed 1960s psych-pop that could teach MGMT a thing or two. "Sunloathe", meanwhile, lovingly channels the Beatles. Listen a little more closely, though, and "I Might" gives up a sample of the acerbic "TV Eye" by Iggy and the Stooges, while "Sunloathe" is hardly an idyll. The album's title isn't just soppy; it refers to a criminal's complete confession to the police. It's safe to assume Tweedy finds the polarisations that dog his band unhelpful. He had this to say in a recent interview about his maturing work: "The definition of growing up is being able to tolerate ambiguity. Not being able to tolerate ambiguity creates all kinds of problems for the world. It creates religious zealots... It's a scourge. Ambiguity is our world."
The Whole Love, then, is a nuanced, feel-good album full of open-endedness, laced with the kinds of observations only instruments can make fluently. It may not rank among Wilco's boldest works. It could have done with more wig-outs. But it captures the art of the almost with both hands.
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The Independent
The last line is a bit bonkers ...
The Independent (sunday edition) has a second bite at the cherry. This time I think the last line might be spot on ...
Album: Wilco, The Whole Love (DBPM Records)Reviewed by Simmy Richman
Sunday, 25 September
What have we come to expect from a new Wilco album – the Beatles-y pop of Summerteeth, the experimentation of A Ghost is Born or the laid-back vibe of Sky Blue Sky?
The band's understated eighth studio album delivers all these things and more.
Will it satisfy every Wilco fan's expectations? No. Nothing could. But with REM's announcement last week, there is a sudden vacancy at the top of the US rock tree and the truth is that Jeff Tweedy's songwriting talents have outstripped Michael Stipe's for years. There will be those who consider The Whole Love a mish-mash, a cop-out. Try to please these people, and you stagnate before you can say REM.
Listen to The Whole Love on headphones. Because it may not be the best Wilco album ever, but with care and consideration it may well turn out to be your favourite.
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According to Blurt
http://blurt-online.com/news/view/5496/
"NPR Music is the host, and you can tune in to the concert being aired direct from Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD, near D.C., staring around 7pm ET. That's when opener Nick Lowe is slated to perform, followed by Wilco around 8:20."
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The Independent
The last line is a bit bonkers ...
Album: Wilco, The Whole Love (dBpm/Anti-)Reviewed by Andy Gill
Friday, 23 September 2011SHARE PRINTEMAILTEXT SIZE NORMALLARGEEXTRA LARGE
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Having spent the better part of the last 15 years constantly touring and recording, building the Wilco "brand" with a dedication that includes customised posters in the classic counter-culture style for each of their shows, Jeff Tweedy decided to take a break for the latter half of last year and re-charge his batteries.
Some break: he returned with enough new material for two albums, which the band have trimmed to the dozen tracks that comprise The Whole Love, another detailed mining of the heart from possibly America's most personal songwriter. Tweedy writes the kind of songs that leave you slightly uncomfortable, as if eavesdropping on another's emotional turmoil, even when the choruses are calling you in to sing along lustily. As he sings here at one point, "I will throw myself underneath the wheels of any train of thought running off the rails," a self-devouring metaphor that captures both the openness and the recklessness of his craft.
But it takes more than just a great songwriter to make a great band; and in its latest incarnation since multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and berserker avant-rock guitarist Nels Cline joined the ranks in 2004, Wilco has become as great a band as any in America.
Effectively, they've wrested the alt.rock crown from R.E.M., with whom they share similar roots in mutant pop and country-rock, and like whom they have developed a flexibility that allows them to thrust confidently into new and unexpected sonic areas. So they manage to slip from the cheerful exuberance of "I Might", with its poppy organ and strutting bassline, straight into the more tentative territory of "Sunloathe", where the plaintive piano and celesta are subjected to whiskery effects akin to a Sparklehorse patina, with no grinding of gears. Sometimes, they effect the manoeuvre in the same song, as in the confluence of Tweedy's whistling and Cline's guitar noise in "Dawned on Me", a genially chugging rocker with another singalong open-heart lyric: "I've been young, I've been old/ I've been hurt and consoled/ Heart of coal, heart of gold, so I'm told".
They open the album almost apologetically, sidling into the seven-minute "Art of Almost" on glitchy, hesitant drums, which are gradually subsumed under a swell of strings before the vocals arrive, before eventually developing a throbbing momentum. It's balanced at the other end of the album by the gently meditative canter of the 12-minute "One Sunday Morning", a song whose intrinsic modesty and charm ensures it doesn't outstay its welcome at all, the recurring guitar motif never losing its appeal throughout the rumination on life, responsibility and duty.
In between these bookending tracks are others which bring to mind influences as disparate as Devo, Doug Sahm, and Van Dyke Parks, songs in which whining pedal steel nestles alongside garage-rock organ, twinkling glockenspiel and strident guitar weirdness, a riot of expansive sonic colour. If it's not quite the landmark that was Wilco (the album), it's not far behind, as absorbing as any you'll hear this year.
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The British are coming! Short but sweet.
The Guardian 4 / 5
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/22/wilco-the-whole-love-review
Wilco: The Whole Love - review- Dave Simpson
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 September 2011 23.50 BST
Jeff Tweedy's Chicago band have made a mockery of their initial pigeonholing as alt.country. On their eighth album, the typically unpredictable primary influences seem to be Nick Lowe's spiky new wave and the multitracked Beatles of Abbey Road. Then again, the single
could be Tom Petty guesting with Spoon. Produced so inventively that it still often feels avant garde, The Whole Love unifies Wilco's leftfield and pop sensibilities. The album rollercoasts from speaker-melting guitar solos (Art of Almost) to contemplative comedowns (Sunloathe, Black Moon) to recorded bells and a town crier (Capitol City). They have ideas to burn, but the best moment here is the simplest: the sublime One Sunday Morning, based around a folk guitar motif of such beauty it never outstays its welcome during 12 epic minutes. - Dave Simpson
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"His father wore trousers in the bath to keep him from looking down on the unemployed."
It all felt good knowing that George was involved with the project. The timing for me was exactly the same as when I was buying all the Beatles albums, and at that teenage age when whole conversations would quote Monty Python sketches.
And speaking of Beatles parodies, this has it's moments. There are a few more bits on YouTube - a weekly segment a while back on Paul Whitehouses latest effort.
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great drama ... so the story's an easy attention grabber for them.
Indeed. As a big Emmylou fan it's a similar thing with the Gram/Emmylou story getting mentioned perennially 40 years on.
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Bloody marvellous. If that was packaged up as a DVD I'd buy it.
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L.A. Times
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/09/album-review-wilcos-the-whole-love.html
Album review: Wilco's 'The Whole Love'
September 22, 2011 | 11:01 am
Wilco in 2011 finds all six members reaching out into new directions, but the result is a strong and cohesive 12-song effort that recalls ‘Summerteeth' and ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.'
It feels a little funny starting a review of Wilco's new album “The Whole Love” with an ode to a drummer, but then Glenn Kotche is no ordinary drummer. Plus, his weird snare-and-bass-kick beat opens the Chicago band's eighth studio album and is the first indicator that Wilco is headed toward yet another heretofore unexplored realm.
The song, called “Art of Almost,” is more than seven minutes long and begins with Kotche introducing an urgent but oblong rhythm, one that takes a few go-rounds to click as a pattern. Once it does, the percussionist, who spent his early years working in Chicago's experimental underground community and whose underrated Nonesuch Records solo album “Mobile” connects many of the legendary label's various strands, drives the next 60 seconds as droplets of synthetic notes gradually introduce a kinda-sorta melody before the whole thing drifts into a fog of strings that sounds like that moment in “A Day in the Life,” except prettier.
It'd be easy to spend the rest of this review, in fact, writing about Kotche's work on “The Whole Love,” how later in that same song he strips away everything except a metronomic, nail-driving snare snap, which propels a wild Nels Cline guitar solo that extends for the final two minutes.
But then each of the five other men who constitute Wilco in 2011 pushes himself in new directions: Jeff Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, Cline, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen. Tweedy, the band's founder, singer and songwriter, solidified this lineup in 2007, and he sure knows how to pick 'em. The result on “The Whole Love” is a work by a group of exceptional musicians who, four years into their collaboration, have melded into one.
Over the band's 17-year career, Tweedy's Wilco has gradually moved from a roots-rock band to something a bit more nebulous, as though the bandleader were with each album further distancing himself from his whiskey bottle and Levis past.
That process began long ago with the sophomore double album “Being There,” and was further cemented on the band's first great departure, “Summerteeth” from 1999, a guitar-pop gem with nary a hint of twang or blues. Wilco's 2002 album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” remains its most adventurous and acclaimed; more recent albums such as “Sky Blue Sky” — the first featuring the band's current lineup — and its last album, “Wilco (The Album),” saw the group step back a little into more traditional, sing-song structures.
Not so “The Whole Love,” a 12-song effort that's way more “Summerteeth” and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” than more recent efforts: The band is having fun not only with sound but with structure, without sacrificing catchiness. Nearly every song contains some tangential surprise, odd hook, sonic back flip or midsong redefinition. The first single, “I Might,” sounds like ? and the Mysterians covering Radiohead and is the closest thing to a simple rock song on the record (rivaled by “Dawned on Me,” which suggests Electric Light Orchestra). “Sunloathe” is a surreal, psychedelic piano ballad carried forward by Kotche's miscellaneous noise and layers of intricate countermelodies. “Standing O” sounds stolen from Elvis Costello's “This Year's Model.”
Wilco's Achilles' heel has always been Tweedy's voice. His singing lives in the midrange; he has trouble going too high — he's never done falsetto — and can't hit Johnny Cash notes without a pack of cigarettes and an early-morning vocal session. Though Tweedy sings all the songs, he's not a supercharged Mick Jagger or Thom Yorke presence; he's more George Harrison than John Lennon. And his lyrics, while evocative, are occasionally too rocky, wordy or unfocused, and mine his thematic obsession with enduring — and unenduring — love, offering little personal snapshots that he attempts to draw universal circles around.
But there's so much going on within “The Whole Love,” so many well-oiled parts driving each song, that the occasional blown cylinder is barely noticeable and is nearly eclipsed by the gorgeous, epic 12-minute closer, “One Sunday Morning (For Jane Smiley's Boyfriend),” which transforms a curlicue guitar line, Stirratt's stealthily engaging bass lines and Jorgensen's confident, free-form piano improvisations into a mesmerizing whole. As the song fades, one sound remains: Kotche's high-hat rhythm. It fades to black as the album closes, but it's probably still echoing quietly somewhere up in outer space.
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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-ca-wilco-20110925,0,7815044,full.story
Wilco is maturing, but it is not growing soft
Exhibit A: 'The Whole Love.' The veteran band, accused of being restrained on its last two albums, sounds rejuvenated and upbeat on its new release.
By Todd Martens, Los Angeles Times
September 25, 2011
Reporting from Chicago —— It was three days before Wilcowas scheduled to leave Chicago to start its tour, and the band was running through songs on its newest album, "The Whole Love." Next up was "One Sunday Morning," a 12-minute cut that is at once the most traditional tune on the album and its most subtle, with slight melodic tweaks and instrumental adornments throughout.
The rehearsal, however, was momentarily delayed. Glenn Kotche, the band's percussionist, was missing an instrument. Could someone, Kotche shouted, bring him his "chicken paddle"? The toy-turned-instrument is exactly as its name implies — a small paddle, adorned with wooden chickens. Shake it, and the chickens peck, although Kotche has modified it so the beaks hit a metal finger cymbal.
"I'm sure it's the first time someone brought a chicken paddle onstage," Kotche said. "I can take credit for that."
Among the ranks of Wilco's accomplishments in its 17 years of musical adventurousness it is, admittedly, minor, but one that reflects the playful camaraderie that went into making "The Whole Love," due out Tuesday.
Wilco has never been shy about flirting with the unexpected, but not since 2001's breakthrough "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" has the band so freely utilized the studio, and never has the band sounded this consistently upbeat. Whether in the digitally enhanced explosiveness of "Art of Almost," the garage rock recklessness of "Standing O" or the orchestral psychedelics of "Capitol City," "The Whole Love" is the sound of a veteran band rejuvenated. It's an album that seems directly aimed at silencing those who would dare write off Wilco's continued move into adulthood as that despicable thing: "dad rock."
"This is a band that has chemistry, and that's inexplicable," Jeff Tweedy said during a break in the band's loft-space kitchen. "This is a band that has a certain amount of maturity, not just age-wise, but experience-wise, in terms of how many records everyone has made and been a part of. This band couldn't exist without having not settled for unsatisfying and ungratifying or dysfunctional situations before. Like relationships, I think a lot of bands go many, many years past where it is working in a functional way. We never had to do that."
In fact, the band believes it is entering its most productive period as a recording unit. "We can make a dozen different records if you stuck us in the studio tomorrow and gave us one week," Kotche said. "We can make straight-up noise. We can make straight-up pop. We can make a folk record. There's so much we have that we haven't even touched upon."
Credit consistency — "The Whole Love" marks the first time Wilco has recorded three albums with the same lineup — or attribute it to newfound freedom. Like veterans Radiohead and Weezer before them, Wilco is going independent. "The Whole Love" is the inaugural release on the band's own dBpm Records, which has partnered with Silver Lake's Anti-, an off-shoot of punk label Epitaph, for marketing and distribution.
It's a jump that seemed inevitable. Wilco capitalized on the digital-era confusion of the music business early, and the success of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" has become the stuff of industry legend. It was to be the third Wilco album released by the Warner Music Group's Reprise Records, but the label rejected it. The album found its audience after the band gave it away free online, and ultimately, "Yankee" was released by Nonesuch, a label also owned by Warner. Wilco continued to work with Nonesuch through 2009's "Wilco (The Album)."
Still, the band has always mixed up its approach in the studio. For 2007's "Sky Blue Sky," the band recorded it live in its Chicago space with limited overdubs. Last time out on "Wilco (The Album)," Kotche said, "Jeff had a lot of it down. Like, 'Here's the chords, and here's the lyrics.'"
"On this one," Kotche continued, "Jeff was very clear: 'Any ideas get explored.' … It was more similar to the way 'Yankee' was made, with just layers of stuff. I felt a lot more freedom to just mess around."
Co-producer/multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone said: "I wanted to make a really good headphone record. I felt like we're the kind of band that could do that."
Tinkering continued in the lead-up to the band's Sept. 13 gig in Indianapolis. As of Sept. 9, Wilco had never played live "Art of Almost," a pure studio creation. This wasn't, however, cause for alarm, as the confidence was evident by a lack of sweating the details.
"Some so-called rock situations can be quite arduous, in terms of the amount of rehearsal time and poring over tiny details," said guitar/improviser Nels Cline. "Wilco is not like that. It's much more like a country or blues band. It's more about playing in a nuts-and-bolts way and letting things be able to flex."
"Dawned on Me," for instance, changed throughout the day. Cline had purchased a used double-neck guitar for it, and the brief mid-section solo was growing longer and meaner with each take, at one point matching the pitch of a fire engine that roared down the Chicago streets.
"Ummm, that's difficult," Cline said after the fifth take as he stared down at his guitar. Tweedy, however, set aside his acoustic instrument and leaned back. "I found it to be quite easy," he said with a rock star's sarcastic snottiness.
The D word
Hours earlier, John Stirratt, Wilco's only remaining original member other than Tweedy, was discussing Chicago's top restaurants. Tweedy walked into the kitchen and interrupted with a question that came seemingly out of nowhere. "Are you guys talking about dad rock?"
No, Stirratt said, and proceeded with his theory that Windy City celebrity chefs, Rick Bayless and Paul Kahan among them, were the new rock stars. Tweedy looked skeptical, and then put his hands in the air in mock admiration. "That blueberry compote changed my life," he yelled.
Tweedy went on his way, however, before he could be asked about the phrase he uttered with withering disgust.
Certain periods of Wilco's history have fallen victim to the myth that suffering equals great art. The recording session for "Yankee," captured in the documentary "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," was fraught with tension. Tweedy and his late songwriting partner Jay Bennett were falling out, and the band was dumped by its label. "A Ghost Is Born," 2004's follow-up, is marked by aggressively claustrophobic guitars, believed to be the result of Tweedy's struggle with painkillers.
Then "Sky Blue Sky" captured a softer, more soulful side of Wilco Media reaction focused heavily on how the band's frontman, now 44, was sober, happy and approaching middle age. The members of Wilco are acutely aware of criticism of the group, especially that implying Wilco is aging tamely.
"Being a dad twice over now, that phrase makes no sense," Kotche said. "My life is so much more chaotic than it was beforehand. My life is chaos all the time. I understand the term means complacent, middle-aged and you have a house and a luxury car, but man, being a dad? I drink 10 times more than I did before."
"Sky" was the sound of a band pushing the reset button. Cline and Sansone were now full-time members, and keyboardist-computer ace Mikael Jorgensen was taking on a more prominent role. Though 2009's "Wilco (The Album)" took more chances, it hinted at the various styles explored throughout Wilco's catalog. It was comfortable rather than surprising.
Wilco's biggest commercial success remains "Yankee," which has sold 674,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. "Sky" and "Wilco (The Album)" sold 389,000 and 299,000 copies, respectively. The band, however, has remained influential and a powerful touring entity.
"I, personally, don't get a lot of the criticisms of either one of those records," Tweedy said of the perception that the band's prior two efforts were less risky. "I stand by them. I'm proud of them. I guess I can hear what people are saying when they say it sounds like a step backward, but I don't think those people heard our earlier records.
"First of all," he continued, "whenever somebody says experimental I know that they don't know what that word means. In the context of Wilco, there's nothing really experimental and there never has been, in the grand scheme of things. We've experimented for ourselves, and we try to broaden what we think we're capable of doing."
Cline would argue that Tweedy, the group's lyricist, is being modest. "Jeff is like a sculptor or collage artist or surrealist artist," he said. "He's like Robert Rauschenberg. He takes bits and pieces of this and that — some junk and some treasured items — and assembles them into a very coherent thing."
The first seven minutes of "The Whole Love" would seem to illustrate Cline's theory. Opener "Art of Almost" starts with the manipulated sound of a computer booting up, and then becomes a swirl of digital effects as a funky, fuzzed-up bass builds to a monstrous ending that Kotche described as an "amazing guitar raga, weird, punk thing."
It's long removed from where the song began. Think groovy, adult soul. "It started out as a late-night slow-jam," said Sansone, who shares a producer credit on the album. "When it was on our CD of demos, my subtitle for it was 'Sade Song.'"
Lofty ambition
Sansone said he knew early on that the follow-up to "Wilco (The Album)" would be a departure. He remembered a moment touring for the latter when Tweedy spied him and Jorgensen mixing various Wilco side projects.
"He said something to the effect of, 'Wow, for our next record we should make our "Sgt. Pepper's.'" He saw all the production happening around him," Sansone recalled. "Not that we made our 'Sgt. Pepper's,"' but I think there was an unconscious impulse to make a record that really utilized the studio."
Tweedy winced when asked about that moment. "If I said that, I meant, 'The best record of all time.' I feel that way every time. I don't think there's much fun in trying to make a good Wilco record. I think it's really fun to measure yourself against ridiculous heights of glory, with the firmly rooted reality that reaching that is impossible."
Tweedy is careful and considerate when interviewed. He paused regularly, asked as many questions as he received and joked often. When Sansone complimented the minor league baseball cap he was wearing, the singer leaned forward and whispered into a reporter's microphone, "They don't dare tell me my hat doesn't look cool."
Yet he's dead serious about Wilco's ambition and noted the band has "this hunger to make something super cool. I think it's hard to make a record that means much to people without going at it like that. There's certainly records that sound tossed off and have become important for different reasons, but those aren't the records we're talking about. We're talking about the grand scale. Why not?"
No doubt those at Anti- are happy to hear those words. Wilco manager Tony Margherita said Anti- first attempted to sign Wilco after the band was dropped from Reprise, but this partnership was ultimately cemented when Tweedy produced Mavis Staples' 2010 album "You Are Not Alone" for the imprint. Wilco's sales of 300,000 copies may be so-so for a major, but they're a blockbuster for an indie.
Wilco won't make it to L.A. until January, but by then the band will have a pretty good idea what those in the audience are thinking. Wilco made "The Whole Love" available for streaming on its website a month before its release, and Tweedy spent the weekend watching fan comments arrive. It was suggested that it may be healthier not to look.
Tweedy shrugged. "I'm reaching out. That's the whole point. You can't do this in a vacuum. It's part of the dialogue. I wouldn't be me if I didn't really want people to love this."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/09/wilcos-jeff-tweedy-i-was-becoming-a-cliche-.html
Wilco's Jeff Tweedy: 'I was falling into a cliche'
September 21, 2011 | 7:07 am
Wilco is happy. Get used to it.
"We’re probably the only band where everyone is early for bus call," said drummer Glenn Kotche. "When we check out of a hotel room we’re not waiting 20 minutes for such-and-such to get whatever girl was there out of the room. Everyone is there and on the bus five minutes before we’re supposed to be there. Not to make this sound like a Boy Scout troop, but we have our act together."
That wasn't always the case. Leader Jeff Tweedy uses the word "dysfunction" quite regularly when discussing parts of the band's past, namely the period around the recording of 2001 album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."
A quick recap: Tweedy's late songwriting partner Jay Bennett and founding drummer Ken Coomer were fired. The band was dropped from Warner Music Group's Reprise Records, and Tweedy's struggle with painkillers is believed to have led to the aggressive guitars and abstract lyrics of 2004's "A Ghost is Born."
When Wilco regrouped as a six-piece for 2007's "Sky Blue Sky," the sound was softer, more soulful. In some regards, it was a first album, as guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone were now full-time members, and keyboardist/programmer Mikael Jorgensen was taking on a more prominent role. It was recorded live, "a conscious effort to focus on what a new band focuses on: playing together, and trying to get real performances," Tweedy said.
As the band was on the verge of releasing its eighth album on Aug. 27, "The Whole Love," which will be the subject of a Times feature later this week, Tweedy had little patience for the belief that a healthy, drama-less band led to a more complacent work. "The Whole Love," after all, is prime evidence that the idea that suffering fuels more animated art is nothing more than a myth. The album, the third straight Wilco album to be recorded with the same lineup, is arguably the band's most energetic, placing a greater emphasis on digital textures, psychedelic adornments and studio tinkering.
"I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful," Tweedy said. "At the same time, when I started to get healthy I realized there’s no shortage of damage there from myself. My distaste for it probably prevented me from getting help sooner. I didn’t want to admit that I was falling into a cliché."
Some
outside observers raised the idea that an older, cleaner, more content Wilco was the result of the band leaning heavily on its rootsy tendencies on "Sky" and 2009's "Wilco (The Album)." As intricate as the albums were, there were fewer of the avant touches that dotted Wilco's work on "Yankee" and "A Ghost is Born." Not so, said Tweedy, as "Sky" and "Wilco (The Album)" were the result of the latest and most consistent incarnation of Wilco finding its footing in the studio."The artists that have created without having any physical flaws and psychological damage don’t get any ink," Tweedy said. "And if it doesn’t exist, people find it. 'Well, he writes like that because his mother died when he was 42.' I’m endlessly fascinated by the durability of that myth, and the length that people go who don’t write, or don’t create, to defend it. It’s a built-in kind of excuse, like, ‘I could write like that, but I have a life.'"
Kotche, in fact, who has been with Wilco since "Yankee," said the band is just now entering its most progressive period. "We’re a really functional unit," he said. "I think a lot of people will think that will reflect on the record and sound complacent and comfortable. It didn’t. It offered a sense of freedom that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. It was never like, ‘OK, I’m going to get my part done and get out of here because this is weird.’
"There was none of that," he continued. "There was freedom."
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Tone Audio
http://www.tonepublications.com/music/thewholelove/
Wilco: The Whole Love The Whole Love
Anti Records CD, 2 LP
Wilco’s The Whole Love begins with a crush of digital thunder. It’s the sound, perhaps, of computer-hard drives malfunctioning. Or maybe it’s the band imagining some sort of electronic warfare. The specifics aren’t quite discernable, but it’s gripping nonetheless. Don’t look to leader Jeff Tweedy for guidance, either. “I can be so far away from my wasteland…Ambulance,” he sings, an artist tortured by his own mind. Hi-tech warbles lead to a funky, effects-drenched bass, and plaintive vocals give way to an eruption of scorching guitars, instruments trailed by a rhythm so rushed it nearly runs itself over. Wilco calls this song—this exercise is in computer-enhanced rock n’ roll carnage—“Art of Almost,” and it sounds unlike anything the band has ever recorded.
Well done, Wilco, well done.
Not since the extended melodic deconstruction of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” which heralds the beginning of 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, has Wilco launched an album with an opening track this far out of the realm of listener expectations. Wilco, now in its 17th year, long ago trained fans to anticipate the unexpected. Yet something happened on 2009’s Wilco (The Album). While there was no shortage of finely crafted songs, rock n’ roll comfort seemed to outnumber the surprises.
Rare was it that such sharp musicianship, such a competent knack for a melody, would feel so normal. Ever since the Chicago band unleashed 1996’s sophomore Being There, which jettisoned the backyard country of feel of the debut AM, for spacious roots-rock atmospheres, it felt as if a gauntlet was being thrown at the feet of its fans. No two albums, the Tweedy-led outfit seemed to be saying, would ever sound the same. And thus it was so.
Lineups changed, sometimes drastically, but the mission didn’t. There was gallantly harmonious orchestral pop (1999’s Summerteeth), exquisitely detailed art-rock minimalism (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), aggressively claustrophobic guitars (2004’s A Ghost is Born), and soul-enhanced folk-rock (Sky Blue Sky). On Wilco (The Album), the band neatly, and confidently, touches on all of the above, with the sole exception being the panic-stricken “Bull Black Nova.”
The Whole Love, however, is full of the exceptions. Some, of course, are stronger than others. Sadly, the entire album doesn’t have the cut-and-paste intensity of “Art of Almost.” Yet there’s a studio-driven sheen that makes this, from start to finish, the freshest Wilco work since A Ghost is Born. Much credit must be given to multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, who Tweedy enlisted for a greater production role.
Sansone adorns many tracks with a symphonic lushness, and helps liven up even Wilco’s more traditional moments. Seesawing violins and drummer Glenn Kotche’s constantly in-motion clickity-clack rhythm add a softness to the starkness of “Black Moon,” while “Sunloath” tiptoes to a finale drenched in 60s psychedelics. “I don’t want to lose this fight,” Tweedy sings with his comforting rasp, and the chorus-less song rescues its lyricist in the final moments with swooning harmonies and crystallizing guitars, finishing with a kaleidoscope of instrumental colors.
Those who have seen Wilco live in recent years know that the current six-piece incarnation—the only Wilco lineup to have lasted for three full albums—has the ability to put on an expansive, blistering rock n’ roll show packed with highs and lows. The Whole Love seems to recognize such a feat, as often here, Tweedy is not the focal point. He’s brash and energized on “I Might,” sure, but that song belongs to bassist John Stirratt and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen. Never has Wilco sounded this groovy, as Stirratt’s fuzzy bass leads the song with an R&B shimmy. Jorgensen, meanwhile, channels 60s rockers the Zombies and plays give-and-take with Tweedy.
Ace guitarist Nels Cline gets plenty of moments to roam, and turns the solitary sentiment of “Born Alone” into a statement of defiance. He also contrasts giant bar-band riffs with sleek, artsy fills on the delightfully reckless “Standing O.” “I mope and I cry and attack,” Tweedy sings on the latter, a moment that captures the emotional schizophrenia of much of the lyrics. “Capitol City,” for instance, seems like a giant mind-game. Musically, the old-fashioned jaunty pop stroll is Wilco at its silliest, while lyrically, it’s an embrace that tries to keep its distance. As Tweedy sings later on the album, “As intimate as a kiss over the phone.”
The “Art of Almost” creates nearly impossible expectations for Wilco’s eighth album, yet The Whole Love comes close to delivering on them. “Dawned on Me” may be a tad slight, and “Rising Red Lung” is all darkness amidst an album that’s spry and bright. Yet the record is a daring statement, even coming to a close with 12 minutes of acoustic exploration. “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” unfolds with slight melodic tweaks and shading throughout, underscoring once again that Wilco, nearly 20 years into its career, still has plenty left to investigate.
–Todd Martens
Bowlegs 6 / 10
http://www.bowlegsmusic.com/2011/09/wilco-the-whole-love/
Wilco – The Whole LovePosted on 22 September 2011 by Bowlegs
As the opening track, ‘Art of Almost’, breaks in with electronic glitches and Radiohead fervour; as the swelling strings fall and make way for Mr Tweedy; and as the song manages to balance beautiful experimentation with a hint of melancholy (the latter captured within a one word chorus) Bowlegs felt a most euphoric high; as if Wilco’s previous two albums had never really happened, and we had finally received the rightful heir to ‘A Ghost is Born’.
So when the acoustic strums and the Doors-like organs appear within the speedy stomper ‘I might’, it was a euphoric comedown. Tweedy may be in a feisty mood, talking about “pissing blood”, and the electric guitars may squeal intermittently, but that aside, this is middle-row Wilco. You know the Wilco we’re talking about, the one where the musicians are so adept at their job, they squeeze the life out of every instrument they touch. Their perfect, precise and controlled delivery is even apparent on those frenzied and out-of-control elements that are suppose to add some edge to it all.
With that all said, there are some fine moments here, lifting it above ‘Wilco (The Album)’ by some distance. ‘Black Moon’ is reminiscent of a solo-Tweedy effort, that stumbles into beauty via picking guitars and warm brushes of pedal-steel: and the twelve minute, drum-brushing ballad, ‘One Sunday Morning’, pushes Tweedy’s vocal up against the mic for an intimate performance, which actually does make all the difference.
The shuffling ‘Capitol City’ is an unnecessary inclusion; we’ll leave it there on that one. ‘Born Alone’ is more typically modern day Wilco, offering little melody (steady beats, breezy tune and guitar breakouts) while ‘It Dawned On Me’ is more of the same. Imagine these songs without Tweedy, and there isn’t much to imagine.
As the enigmatic front man softly delivers the line: “I would like to be the one to open up your mind”, there’s a sense that he may need to make a few dramatic choices, if he’s to have any chance of doing that.
-Johnny Newsom-
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NZ Under the Radar 9 / 10
http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/utr/review/CID/559/N/The-Whole-Love.utr
Wilco - The Whole LoveThe Whole Love
Wilco
ANTI
9 / 10
22nd September 2011 By Ivy Rossiter
Wilco carries their history with them. As each of their albums has opened doors on new territories to explore, the band has borne the battered suitcases of their past to open and unpack amongst the new surroundings of innovation and reinterpretation of their sound. Wilco’s new record The Whole Love triumphantly embodies both old and new; both revision and exploration; nostalgia and anticipation.
The album opens with the seven minute long epic “Art Of Almost”, treading entirely new ground with grooving, beeping synthesizers mating with a luscious string section making up the foundation for the instrumental. Tweedy’s vocal is the sole connection to any prior Wilco experience until a huge buildup and Nels Cline’s nearly 3 minute long solo takes over in a swathe of distortion and clapping, barking drums.
Wilco is in their element with singles “I Might” and “Born Alone”, pop songs with satisfying rotations of light and dark, acoustic and rock. The softer moments in “Black Moon” and “Open Mind” hearken to 2007’s Sky Blue Sky; “Capitol City” to Summerteeth; “Whole Love” to 2009’s sassy Wilco (The Album).
Unfortunately, there is one small blemish to one song on the album. I would be remiss to ignore “Dawned On Me”s undeniable homage/soundalike to Supergrass’s “Alright”. The song is catchy, a great danceable track, with an incredibly memorable hook - it’s just unfortunate that same hook teeters on the line between homage and carbon-paper territory.
Despite the similarity of “Dawned On Me” to its aforementioned British song-brother, I can’t help but love this album. This is a joyous record. The satisfaction and ease that permeates The Whole Love never lays back complacent, but instead exudes a sense of delight that feels well at home in it’s multifarious instrumental housing. Each track embodies something different and specific that I love about each period of their career. Wilco’s baggage anchors them, and their vision makes this album fly.
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Chicago Tribune 3 out of 4
Album review: Wilco, 'The Whole Love'
Greg Kot
Music critic
11:29 p.m. CDT, September 21, 2011
3 stars (out of 4)
After seven studio albums, capped by the summing-up statement “Wilco (The Album)” in 2009, the Chicago band seemed to be out of surprises. The music had soul and low-key integrity, but had turned predictable. So it’s gratifying to find that assumption shattered from the get-go on “The Whole Love,” the sextet's first album for its homemade label, dBpm.
Greg Kot
Opener “Art of Almost” is a seven-minute sound collage that plays with the listener’s expectations in a way that Wilco hasn’t since “A Ghost is Born” (2004).
The first sound on the album is the crackle of static over a fragmented beat. Keyboards shudder into the mix, and Tweedy sings from the middle of a parched landscape of strange sound effects: “I can’t be so far away from my wasteland.” Distorted chords suggest muffled gun shots. Percussion percolates and then glides into a steady electronic pulse as if out of a science-fiction soundtrack. It’s a movie playing out between the headphones, and then after four minutes the scene dramatically shifts. A guitar drones, then breaks into a sprint, racing alongside drums and a rollercoaster bass line to a thrilling finish.
“Art of Almost” is an exciting, if instantly divisive song, like “Misunderstood” or “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” from an earlier phase in Wilco’s career. There’s nothing else quite like it on the album, but it serves as a timely reminder that Wilco is still a long way from coasting into its middle years.
The uptempo “I Might” amplifies that impulse. John Stirratt’s overdriven bass rips through the speakers like a rusty saw, and Tweedy issues a threat over bright garage-rock organ chords: “You won’t set the kids on fire/But I might.”
“Sunloathe” sounds like the aftermath of a long night, the narrator too exhausted or too narcotized to do anything more than blink into a remorseless sun. His voice drifts in and out of a dream-like atmosphere of twinkling keyboards, disembodied guitars and wordless vocal harmonies. It’s a whirring slice of Beatles’ chamber pop, with Tweedy delivering a final kiss-off: “I don’t want to lose this fight/I don’t want to end this fight/Goodbye.”
After that bracing beginning, the middle of the album is more workmanlike: The autumnal folk of “Black Moon” and “Rising Red Lung,” the country ballad “Open Mind,” the jaunty vaudeville of “Capitol City,” the arena-rock chords of “Standing O.” It’s not exactly Wilco by numbers, but it feels tame in comparison to the first three tracks.
Yet, as a sheer sound experience, “The Whole Love” is rewarding, a tapestry of tiny details that invites close listening. On most of the songs, Tweedy indulges in lyrics that blur the line between nonsense and poetry, revelation and obfuscation. The words, it turns out, are really mostly about sound rather than sense. So it’s no surprise that he speaks through the band most clearly. As the album’s producer with keyboardist Patrick Sansone and engineer Tom Schick, Tweedy uses the band’s Northwest Side recording studio as another instrument to complement, enhance and distort the musicianship.
Stirratt, besides Tweedy the band’s sole constant since its inception in 1994, is an anchoring force, his bass playing consistently brilliant. The keyboards of Sansone and Mikael Jorgensen color in a wealth of detail, Glenn Kotche’s drumming adds orchestral flair, and Nels Cline gets a bit more room to roam on guitar.
It all comes together on the final song, “One Sunday Morning.” Over 12 patient minutes, Tweedy tells a tale of familial conflict, death and regret amid a cocoon of acoustic guitars and piano. It’s a poetic narrative that recalls Wilco’s take on Woody Guthrie’s “Remember the Mountain Bed.” The song winds down and then back up, a hypnotic pattern of decline and rejuvenation that mirrors life itself. It makes for a quietly stunning bookend to the opening track’s take-it-or-leave-it boldness.
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Excellent - ta very much for the info.
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Very interesting stuff ...
http://www.sonicscoop.com/2011/09/21/behind-the-release-wilco-the-whole-love/
Behind The Release: Wilco “The Whole Love”
September 21, 2011 by Justin Colletti
Wilco is one of those rare bands who have become something of a household name without the benefit of media saturation or even a single platinum-selling release.
Fronted by singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy and comprised of an evolving cast of much-lauded players, this is a band comes from that special breed of genre-defining artists who attract more GRAMMY nods and diehard fans than they do bell-weather listeners. And, although their roots are as deep in classic Americana, they’ve developed a reputation as inveterate adventurers and experimenters.
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In these ways, they have less in common with fellow Midwestern roots-rockers, and a lot more in common with artists like Tom Waits, Sonic Youth, and The Flaming Lips – prestige acts who are often signed and supported by major labels for the credibility and increased bargaining power that goes along with having them on board.
Aside from a momentary and well-documented break from the majors when they were dropped by Warner Bros (only to be picked up by none other than… Warner Bros?!), Wilco have only seemed like indie artists. But this September, with the release of The Whole Love on their own dBpm imprint, they finally are.
For this album, the band enlisted New York-based producer/engineer Tom Schick, who had just served behind the console for the Tweedy-produced, GRAMMY-winning Mavis Staples album You Are Not Alone.
For his Behind The Release series, correspondent Justin Colletti talked to Schick about recording and mixing Wilco’s first Indie album at the band’s private studio in their hometown of Chicago, Illinois.
JC: Tom, thanks for taking the time to talk. This is new territory for the band: Recording exclusively in their own studio for a release on their own label. How early did you get involved in that process?
TS: I was lucky enough to be involved with it from the very beginning, when everyone was coming in, plugging in and just starting to play with each other.
For this album, they did a lot of writing in the studio. Jeff [Tweedy] would come in with an idea or a riff and begin playing it – pretty soon they’d all be playing together. Based on that initial seed, everyone would gradually find their part. It was kind of like watching a puzzle click together piece-by-piece. Sometimes they’d work on a song for a little while, put it away and come back to it later. And a few times they would get something together that would be the song and they’d get the take. Thankfully we were just recording everything.
That’s interesting. So they’re kind of creating whole arrangements at once in a collaborative way?
Yeah. But also, everyone would take their turn adding whatever they felt like adding to it. It was an extremely collaborative process, and really a lot of fun. As far as the creative process goes, there were no limitations, any idea anyone had could be done. Of course some things would work and some things wouldn’t, but it was a very open process.
When every run-through has the potential of being a keeper take or an important reference-point, how do you set up in a way that’s conducive that process?
Well, it’s a tricky thing, because there are so many people in the band and each of them play so many different instruments.
I wanted everything set up at once, so anybody could pick up any instrument and play it at any time and there would be no changeover. Before they even came into the studio I spent about a day plugging everything in, so they could just walk in, grab an instrument and start playing. Of course, it would get fine tuned as we’d go along. We’d add mics, take mics away, but a lot of that foundation remained the same. That way, they could always come back and try an overdub or a whole song again.
Originally, we had it set up to go to 24 track tape. But as soon as we started, we realized we would have gone through probably $50,000 worth of tape at the rate we were going [Laughs]. We ended up going to Pro Tools, and put the whole mixes through tape with Bob Ludwig during mastering. We still went through the line amps of the Studer 827 at The Loft [Wilco's private studio].
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of The Loft, but it’s a big open space. There’s just a bookshelf between the recording console and the rest of the room where the band is playing. There are some baffles around the drum kit, but it’s not really a soundproofed or acoustically treated space. It was a really fun way to work because everyone is just in the room, playing together.
In a lot of ways it was a kind of simple and straight-forward setup.
For drums it was just a D12 on the kick, an SM 57 on the snare, and couple of Coles [4038]s as overheads, and a [Neumann] U87 in front of the drum kit. All that went through some API pres.
We added a couple of mics as we went along, because Glenn [Kotche] will bring in some pretty un-traditional pieces to the kit. But the 5 mics is a pretty good way to get started and lay the foundation. If you start with too many mics, I find, it slows the process down. It takes forever to get sounds, people get impatient – it’s easier to get something sounding good with as few mics as possible and add things as you need them. The more mics you have the more issues there are with phase, and sometimes adding too many mics to an instrument ends up making everything sound a little smaller.
Bass was just an RE20 on the cabinet and a DI. For the electric guitar amps for Nels [Cline],
Jeff and [Co-Producer] Pat [sansone] we had some Royer [121]s, and those were going through Neve modules.
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So you had the same setup for each player, and the differences in tones came at the instrument and amp level?
Exactly. You know, I think Pat’s amp may have had a 57 on it, but that was really because we just ran out of Royers.
The board at the studio is a Sony board, which is kind of like an old MCI board. But we didn’t really use the board at all except for monitoring. There’s about 20 channels of API pres and EQs and then there’s a Neve sidecar with another 10 or 12 channels of Class A Neves, so all the tracking was done through those.
For Jeff’s Vocal we used a [shure] SM7, partially because that’s the mic that he’s used to, and partially because when you have everybody in the room together, that’s a good mic for [eliminating] bleed. If you have a U47 or something like that, with guitar amps blasting in the same room, it can be hard to control.
On Jeff’s acoustic guitar we used a CMV 563 Neumann mic which is a mic I had that we used on the Mavis Staples record that Jeff produced. Jeff liked it so much that he went online and found one for himself! It was a pretty nice luxury to have access to two of them.
We had some spot mics on other stuff – a single [AKG] 414 on the piano in mono, a couple of 57s on the organ, and a couple of DI lines for Mike and Pat. Eventually there were a couple of DIs for [drummer] Glenn [Kotche]
Was that piano an upright or a baby grand?
A baby grand, just mono. When there’s that many instruments, I find it’s much easier in a mix to pan a mono piano left or right, where when you have a stereo piano, a lot of times it just eats up too much of the track, and you don’t have room for all the other instruments.
When you’re recording piano in a room with instruments blaring, where do you put that AKG C 414 to get some semblance of isolation? Or is it just not that much of a concern?
It’s not too much of a concern. The piano did have a short stick, so I used that and threw a blanket over it, and had the mic in right over the hammers. It does make it sound a little more like an upright when you record a baby grand in that way. I try to get as far away as I can without making the bleed too ridiculous, and when we’d do something that’s more of a solo piano, yeah, we’d open up the lid and pull the mic back a little bit.
Coming from my time engineering at Sear Sound, if I had the choice, I probably would have used an [AKG] C12a or something, but they had a 414, and that worked too.
So you pretty much used all the band’s gear, right? Were there any pieces that you just had to have and brought in for yourself, or did you just use what was already there?
Tom Schick
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They had a great amount of stuff there. They had a good amount of compression too. They had a couple of Manley compressors, a couple of Chandler TG1s, some 1176s, a pair of Distressors. For the mixing I brought in a few things of mine. I brought in a couple of dbx 160 VUs and a Pendulum 6386 compressor just to have on hand.
Where did you end up using those?
The dbx I used on the kick and the snare. The Pendulum I used on a variety of different things, on a song-to-song basis. It could have been an acoustic guitar, sometimes it would be some background vocals.
Do you track through some of this stuff too?
Yeah I did. Kick and snare I think had an 1176, for the overheads the studio had a stereo Tube Tech, and then for the bass amp and DI we had a couple of LA3As. On Jeff and Nel’s electric guitars I think we had a Manley ELOP compressor, for vocals we had another 1176, and then there was a Chandler TG1 which did a nice job on acoustic guitar.
Well the record sounds pretty great. It’s very well-controlled without ever seeming over-compressed. How do you like to approach compression going in?
When I’m going into Pro Tools I often use compression just to save my ass from going into the red.
I don’t like to over-compress things because you can’t undo it, but at the same time if you’re hitting things hard and it sounds good, I’m not going to change anything if that means losing the take. When you have a group of musicians out there and they’re really playing together, and they might go from a really soft song to a really loud song, you know, you’re all of a sudden going to be slamming the compressors on some of the meters. You try to get it as good as you can, but if they’re ready to record, you’ve got to just start recording.
I’m embarrassed to say it, but I had always heard about Wilco, but never had a chance to give them much a listen until the first time I heard their drummer, Glenn Kotche, play.
I was doing sound for a couple of shows with Bryce and Aaron from The National and he was their opening act, just doing his solo drum performances. I ended up mixing his set too, and was immediately blown away. It’s this very ornate, well-orchestrated stuff that you’d never expect to all be coming from one person. It’s challenging, but thoroughly listenable and engaging at the same time.
Both Glenn, and Wilco’s keyboard player Mikael Jorgenson, seem to love playing with sound, and they’re often credited as coming from a more experimental background. What were their contributions to record?
Well, I’ll say that nobody in the band does anything “far out” just for the sake of being “far out”. But if you want to hear a good example of what Glenn brings to the band, you just have to listen to his drumbeat on the song “The Art Of Almost“.
When he first started playing that rhythm I thought to myself: “Is he hearing the rest of the track, or is he just randomly playing this beat?”, because it was just so crazy. But as he kept playing, it started to make so much sense.
As I listened more and got the proper balance together it just sounded so great. In the end, that part is so much fun – and so natural, too. It sounds like the song was written off of that beat, but in reality, a lot of the more atmospheric sounds were already there on that song. It just fit.
Does he ever need to be reeled in a little bit?
No, he never really needs to be restrained. If you listen to some of his stuff that sounds simple at first, when you dig a little deeper, it’s not really simple at all. I think he’s just a really musical guy and he has the ability to play something that’s really complex without having it sound that way on the surface. If you listen to the record, his playing really does have a lot of layers. I don’t remember anyone ever saying to him “play something more straight ahead”. If anything, Jeff would even say, “I want something even crazier,” and Glenn would just say, “Ok, great. I can do that.” [Laughs]
And what about Mikael?
Now Mike, they call him Doctor Science. When he’d get his time with a song, he would spend a few hours just dialing things in. If you listen to the beginning of the song “Sun Load” there’s a crazy vocal effect on the first verse. That’s a feed of Michael manipulating Jeff’s vocal in real time.
The way I’ve heard you describe it, the band was doing less of a traditional “overdub” process where after the basic tracking, people just lay down parts they’ve all agreed on in rehearsal. You’ve mentioned that each person might take a few hours on their own with each song.
Yeah. We’d be listening, and somebody would get inspired, have an idea, and everybody would give that person their space to flesh it out. Rather than having everyone sit around weighing in on it, saying “that’s great” or “I hate it”, they would all just step away and let that person see his idea through.
That sounds like it takes a lot of trust.
Yeah, trust and respect. They really seem like such a cohesive band. There’s nothing “precious” about any one part – Jeff may have a song thought out, but there’s nothing precious about the arrangement. He’ll let it grow organically. He won’t stifle anybody else’s input. They’re all allowed to do what they do.
Sure, I guess if you wouldn’t trust them to do that, why have them in your band, right?
Exactly! [Laughs] That’s why they’re in this band together.
So those sessions are as much workshopping and arranging the songs as they are overdubbing?
Sure, they’re a little bit of each.
You can only play a song for the first time once. A lot of times, that first take just has the magic and you can’t recreate it, so you might end up building on that take. Or other times we might come back to a song a few days later so it’s fresh again and you’ve learned all these things about where you can go with the song, and what it’s about.
There was no real “set plan” for this record, like “Okay, now we’re going to do the tracking, now we’re going to do overdubs, and now we’re going to do mixing”. There were things being added and taken away right up until the end. Some days could be all tracking, some could be all overdubs. Some days we’d work on one song, and some days we’d work on three or four. It was pretty loose.
You worked in The Loft once before for the Mavis Staples record, You Are Not Alone. What was it like mixing in a new room for you? It’s not a place like Sear Sound, painstakingly designed over decades for critical listening.
It was great. The Loft was a really fun place to work. As long as the space is comfortable and I know what I’m hearing, I’m not super-picky. I can figure it out pretty quickly.
I mixed the Mavis Staples record there before this album, and I just brought in some stuff I knew. I cued up Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, one of my favorite sounding records, so I had a reference point. From that, I knew how the speakers sounded, I knew how the room sounded, and I could go ahead from there.
Before we really got to mixing that record, I went to another more “proper” studio in Chicago, and did a couple of rough mixes there. We compared them to the rough mixes I’d already done back at The Loft, and when we listened there really wasn’t that much of a difference, and we kind of liked what we were getting at The Loft a little bit better. That put our minds at ease about it even more.
Cool. How was mixing on that Sony board? You don’t see them a lot in more commercial rooms around here
Well, for mixing, I split everything out onto the board, but I patched all the tracks into the EQ insert returns on the console.
That way, I bypassed the EQ and some of the electronics, like the line trims. I was really trying to use as little of the board as possible. This way, the only thing the signal was going through was the faders and the routing. Any EQ I’d patch into the Neve sidecar or one of the API EQs, and then we had all the outboard compressors, too.
Are you doing any processing in the computer?
A tiny bit of compression and EQ, but not too much. I kind of recorded the stuff the way I wanted it to sound. So if there was anything, most of the time it would just be a little roll-off to keep too much low-end build-up from happening, that kind of thing.
As far as echo goes, a lot of the slapback delays you’ll hear on the vocal was a Moogerfooger analog delay pedal patched into the board on one of the sends. But for the reverb, I set up a send on the board that would feed an aux track in Pro Tools set up with an Altiverb chamber or plate. The one thing the loft is missing is a good plate, so we had to get a little bit creative, and use the board to send to a reverb back inside Pro Tools.
Sometimes we’d throw up a room mic for mixing too. There’s a stairwell that sounds nice and reverby, and we’d use that as a bit of chamber too.
I know you don’t like to rely on the computer that much when mixing. Where do you like to keep the screen?
That’s a good question. On the Mavis record I had it on the side during tracking, and then brought it to the center, right between the speakers, when I was mixing. But for this record, I just kept it over to the side, on the effects racks. I was going over there to tweak compressor settings and things anyway, but I didn’t set up a chair anywhere near it. I just don’t like to stare at a computer all the time when I’m working on music.
Wilco have suffered from “fans” leaking their albums in the past. This time they’ve done that themselves by streaming the new album themselves as a kind of pre-release. How do you feel about that strategy, and is it new for you?
It is new for me. I’ve worked on records that have been leaked before. What’s interesting about this is that the band is in control of the leak. I think it’s good. They get to play the record for people, and if people like it, I think they’re gonna buy it.
Since there are ways for people to get records for free if they want to, I don’t think the band is losing anything by doing it this way. People who like it are going to want to get a higher quality version of it. I’m not sure what the bit rate of the stream is, but I don’t think it’s going to compare to what this record is going to sound like when it comes out on vinyl.
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http://drownedinsoun...-the-whole-love
"Ultimately a record label is just a weird bank..." - Wilco discuss The Whole LoveWilco just set themselves a record. The Whole Love, the group’s eighth studio album, is the third in a row with its current six-man lineup – a feat of consistency that makes its previous decade of member shakeups look like a bad dream. The group’s last effort may have been dubbed Wilco (The Album), but they should’ve saved the title for this one: it’s their most richly personable effort yet.
“This is just probably the best balanced presentation of Wilco,” says Mikael Jorgensen, chatting by phone from the pre-show hours of the band’s gig in Indianapolis, Indiana. “We all… have that sixth sense about what each other is going to do.”
That’s evident as soon as album opener “Art of Almost,” a seven-minute gauntlet throw that builds and shimmers and squeals around a Glenn Kotche drum fill.
“The song started like a Neil Young, Tonight’s the Night kind of vibe, really subdued and slow,” he says. “Somewhere along the line, Glenn did a drum overdub the same time I did a synthesizer overdub. We were like, ‘Oh, let’s put the drum beat -- the signature rhythm of the song – why don’t we put that in the verses and see if the song can withstand this completely new direction? That’s a good example of let’s just see what happens – and then, holy moly, this is a totally different beast then it was minutes ago. And those are the really exciting moments.”
There are many of those moments on The Whole Love, which should win over “Dad-rock!”-decrying doubters of their more, ahem, laid-back recent releases, Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album). After the migraine-clouded guitar wasteland of A Ghost Is Born and art-pop opus Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there was some disappointment when the band released an album or two of “just” songs was probably to be expected. But Sky Blue Sky in particular wasn’t unambitious, just misunderstood: the influence of new additions Nels Cline (genuine guitar god) and Pat Sansone (bassist John Stirratt’s longtime bandmate in soft-rock side-project the Autumn Defense) merely steered the band toward the simpler pleasures of the analog ‘70s. But there’s nothing basic about the new record, which took advantage of the constraint-free comforts of home at Wilco’s Chicago studio – the Loft – and more modern recording options.
“We made the record all on the computer so we had unlimited track opportunities-slash-curse,” Mikael says. “For me, I placed a limitation on myself – I’m not going to play piano on this record, I really want to try to use my synthesizers and technology and create a different texture or different emotion. Patrick [sansone], he was an experienced record maker and he brought a lot of his vision to the production side of it… background vocals, further overdubs editing and paring down the stuff, which was a new role for him in the band and I think he did a great job.”
Only frontman/songwriter Jeff Tweedy and Stirratt have remained constant since the band’s 1994 inception, with its sound accordingly mutating from the by-the-numbers alt-country of A.M. to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s critically beloved high water-mark and beyond. Yet The Whole Love recalls much of the band’s history: 'Born Alone' follows in the footsteps of Summerteeth’s Beach Boys-influenced rockers; the desolate 'Rising Red Lung' evokes the folk gloom of Being There; 'Capitol City' is closer to the sweeter, sillier moments of Wilco (The Album). That feeling of the familiar may be as far as revisiting musical memories go as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s 10-year anniversary looms next spring.
“Wilco isn’t a band to necessarily get too nostalgic,” Mikael mused. “Perhaps there’s going to be a—I don’t really know, to be honest. It would seem like [we’d do] maybe a greatest hits or something, but does that even count, do we have hits? If we had to do the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-only tour like Sonic Youth has done the Daydream Nation tour, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
The Whole Love is also Wilco’s first step into its music industry future: it will be released on the band’s own dBpm Records, an independent shift that’s all the more notable for the label flip-flop of Foxtrot sharply chronicled in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco.
“My feeling is once our Nonesuch contract was up, it was like, should we go find another label and see what’s out there, or just try to do this ourselves? We have a studio, we have the ability to make records that we want relatively inexpensively,” Mikael says. “Ultimately a record label is just a weird bank.”
It’s not like the band has a shortage of fans -- The Whole Love was a trending topic in Brazil (!) during its 24-hour streaming debut earlier this month, and the former Americana torch-bearers have become an international enterprise.
“I think perhaps the most recent and most awesome new audience is Spain,” Mikael says. “They’ve really just welcomed us. We did a tour in 2009 where we toured two weeks just in Spain and it’s the greatest, they’re so amped for us. It’s such a great energy to anticipate when you’re playing a show and reciprocate as well.”
So take your dad to the show. Hell, take the whole family. An album ago, Tweedy sung "Wilco will love you" and meant it; its burn-outs behind it at last, the band's not just going to fade away.
“It’s something that we all have to do in order to keep sane,” Mikael says. “It’s our therapy, it’s the thing that balances our psyches.”
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The Beeb wades in:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk...ic/reviews/fxgw
BBC Review
Their most adventurous, confident and engaging record in years.
James Skinner 2011-09-21
Since 1994 Wilco have proved themselves one of the most reliable and enjoyable bands to occupy the upper tier of indie-rock hierarchy, though recent LPs Sky Blue Sky (2007) and Wilco (The Album) (2009) might have dented their reputation somewhat as one of the most exciting. Although not bad albums by any stretch of the imagination, they rarely displayed the depth of imagination and beauty present across the group’s back catalogue, exemplified on 2002’s stunningYankee Hotel Foxtrot.
It’s pleasing to be able to report, then, that the band seems both relaxed and reinvigorated on The Whole Love, which is equally at home spinning into stormy electric guitar crescendos as it is offering up deft acoustic numbers. The current line-up has been in place since 2004, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone notably receiving a production credit here, while renowned guitarist Nels Cline’s contribution feels more vital to proceedings than ever before.
But it is on the strength of Jeff Tweedy’s songwriting that the band ultimately succeeds, and here he seems ready and willing to embrace some of the complexities and strangeness that have made their best work so enthralling. Art of Almost makes for a terrific, though slightly misleading opening gambit; Tweedy has noted its position in the tracklisting stems from not having any idea what people will make of it. A dark, hypnotic groove boasting programmed beats, sweeping strings and a deep low end before a thunderous wig-out to finish, it will doubtless (and not for the first time) earn the band many Radioheadcomparisons. Yet with Tweedy’s forlorn, husky pipes at its fore it remains indubitably a product of the Chicago sextet: one that confidently sketches out new territory for the group while sounding almost purpose-built to reward repeated listens.
Lead single I Might furnishes its chugging, catchy hooks with another expressive vocal from Tweedy, who whoops, sighs and hollers his way through the song in playful, free-associative style, while Open Mind is one of the most straightforwardly gorgeous ballads he’s ever written, of a heartbreaking melody and yearning, unrequited lyric so intuitive you wonder it hasn’t always existed (likewise the exuberant, sunny chorus of Dawned on Me). With the closing One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend) the band gracefully unwinds over 12 minutes of twinkling, ruminative acoustica, thus bringing to an end their most adventurous, confident and engaging record in years.
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Entertainment Weekly: A- (feels like the review should be written in red biro)
http://www.ew.com/ew...0530263,00.html
Reviewed by Melissa Maerz | Sep 21, 2011
Should Wilco be worried about Jeff Tweedy? The shaggy-dog singer wanted to call this albumGet Well Soon, Everybody, but he could maybe take that advice himself. On his acclaimed band's eighth studio set, he's letting his brain run off the rails (''Dawned on Me''), popping pills (''Born Alone''), and thinking about setting the kids on fire (''I Might''), while the avant-Americana music echoes the peals of static and feedback that the longtime migraine sufferer likely hears in his head. It's a far cry from 2009's Wilco (The Album), on which the band's I'm-okay-you're-okay folk jams came on like a dad-rock mood stabilizer. And it's also Wilco's most sonically adventurous work since 2004's A Ghost Is Born. For the first time in years, it's clear that Tweedy's actually feeling something.
With The Whole Love, Wilco make noise-pop exciting again, perhaps because the pop part doesn't come easy. For them, there's always more triumph in finding a pretty hook when it's buried beneath sirens, whistling teakettles, and church bells — and there's always more meaning in a love song once some good old-fashioned resentment's built up. With its Byrds-ian melody and gnarled guitars, ''Dawned on Me'' is a testament to a long, hard marriage where ''every night is a test.'' On ''Rising Red Lung,'' Tweedy finds comfort only in the anxious hiss of his own compositions. ''Sadness is my luxury,'' he admits on ''Born Alone,'' and when you listen to The Whole Love, it's easy to understand what he means. If there's a good kind of sadness, this is it. A-
Official reviews of The Whole Love
in Just A Fan
Posted
Saw a piece on JT in The Times this morning. It was the communal office copy and I was going to bring it home to scan, but left without it! I don't have a subscription to The Times online. Because I thought I was going to get it later I only quickly looked over it. There may have been a separate review of the Whole Love but I did not look for it at the time.
Things I learnt:-
1) JT has an exercise bike in his hotel room these days.
2) Wilco are going to be involved in O'Bama's re-election in some shape or form.
3) I am rather forgetful.
4) errr, that's it.