Yes, and that record was broken several times. Incredibly, the current record was set in relatively recent 2015 by Adele's 25, which sold a mind-boggling 3.38 million copies in its first week.

2 hours ago, jff said:

 

Those numbers are interesting.  Considering how difficult and time consuming it is to press a record these days* (see: the massive Cruel Country delay), I doubt any "name" band would do a run of 1000 only to blink and immediately need a full pressing.  I'd be curious to know what their typical sales are on vinyl in the first year of a new release.   

 

*Wilco may have figured out how to beat this problem by...if I'm remembering correctly....partially bankrolling a Chicago pressing plant, which surely lets them jump to the front of the line when they need to press vinyl.   

 

EDIT:  https://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/record-plant-smashed-plastic-is-keeping-it-local/

 

Smashed Plastic pressing plant.  Tweedy/Wilco bought them a pressing machine.  Surely this gives them leeway to press as much or as little as they want, any time they want (within reason), making the 1000 run for preorders plausible.  But I'm still skeptical.  Seems if they were going to do this, there would be something different about the preorder version (and maybe there is and I just don't know about it....different color wax? something different about the cover art/inserts/etc.?)

 

According to the article, Wilco typically presses 30,000 records.

  

In its first week of wide release, Cruel Country sold 7,000 copies across all formats (LP, CD and downloads).* That would include direct sales by the band as well as sales by retailers set up for tracking by Luminate (which will exclude some independent record stores). That number is slightly lower than it would have been but for the "white label" CD release on Record Store Day. (There were a total of 8,000 copies of that release available.)

In its first week of release, the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot box set sold 13,000 copies (8,000 vinyl, 4,500 CD and 500 digital downloads). That includes all the various permutations of the set, from the 2-CD highlights version to the 11-LP behemoth.

Bearing in mind that sales typically peak in the first week for an established artist and then drop off precipitously, these numbers support the idea that they would "budget" 1,000 LPs (and 500 CDs?) for Wilcoworld preorder (since the majority of sales will be through third-party retailers).

I shouldn't be surprised by these numbers, given that the by-far-most-common response by "civilians" when I have mentioned the band over the past 28 years has been "Who?," but it's amazing that the band has been able to sustain such a successful career with such a small audience. Obviously, the band's audience is larger than just the people who still buy their albums in 2023, but it's still small in the grand scheme of things.

* I don't have a breakdown of this, but an educated guess is that 4,500-5,000 were vinyl, 2,000-2,500 were CDs and a de minimis number were digital downloads.

EDIT: I should note that my copy of the LP is black vinyl. There's probably a separate tranche of the "floral ice" variant. Maybe they do another 1,000 of the variant.

I noticed something interesting on the packing slip that came with my Wilcoworld preorder.

For the LP, it says:

BATCH PRINT: 119, 

PREORDER: 1000, R03: 881

For the CD, it says:

R03: 427

I wonder if these numbers are sequential as orders were filled. It's interesting that the LP numbers 119 and 881 add up to 1000, which is also shown. What numbers do other people's slips show? I'm wondering if we can read anything into this about how many preorders there were. It seems plausible to me that they would have ordered a batch of 1,000 LPs to satisfy preorders. And it makes sense to me that this band would have roughly twice as many preorders of the LP (881) as the CD (427), if that's what those numbers mean.

A "First Listen" of Cousin with Jeff providing commentary is airing right now (9 a.m. PDT) on indie88.com. It will reair at 5 p.m. PDT.

1 hour ago, brucebanner said:

I heard the same thing, I keep waiting for Jeff to finish a line with  “but I was a bit too leisurely “ 

https://jefftweedy.substack.com/p/chit-chat-check-in-71-prince-ted

30 minutes ago, lost highway said:

 

Oh yeah! WTF was I saying? Those are two of their all time best album closers, I'm ashamed my memory omitted them!

 

So it's really just SBS, Schmilco, WTA, and OTJ with the closers that don't crush it for me (more power to anyone who feels the opposite). That puts them around 50-50 on satisfying closers for me with the current lineup. Not bad, in a baseball sense which is a dumb angle for me to take music from!

Big fan of "On and On and On" here. When they played it at Port Chester this year, it moved me so much as I thought about the loss of loved ones in 2017 and 2021 that I started sobbing right there on the rail. I was in tears well before the song got to the "go ahead and cry" part.

Per Jeff on Starship Casual today, "Ten Dead" is being retired from the live set because it's "despondent and numb and unfeeling," which is pretty much the vibe that led me to say that nine of the ten Cousin tracks grabbed me right away, with the unstated part being that "Ten Dead" was the outlier. Each time I've listened to it, it has put me in mind of "Ohio" because of the subject matter, but completely devoid of the galvanizing quality of the CSNY song.

4 hours ago, keithdylan said:

Won't go down as one of the best Wilco shows I have ever seen, not bad by any stretch, just lacking something.  The venue didn't help.  I wanna thank the South Side for not having the air conditioning on for the first hour or so.  Hey it was only 97 in Dallas yesterday, no biggie.  The band is always fun to see.  Loved how Nels is doing the solos in Impossible now.  The newer material seemed to send many people on restroom breaks.  When Jeff mentioned Cruel Country, the response was sparse at best.  Dallas is very much a "hits" kind of crowd for most bands.  I am not going to bash Wilco for the same things I admire Dylan for, i.e. not playing the hits, but when you are standing room only, I think that is less conducive to presenting new material than a seated venue is.  For Dallas, they were presenting two albums of new material.  I don't know, maybe that's just me.  I will require a seated venue in the future, or I will skip it.  Judging by the amount of cars that had already left by the last note, I might not be the only one that was a bit disappointed.  If the band skipped Via Chicago and Outtasite/Outtamind, someone on the stage wasn't feeling it either.

I'm really looking forward to standing throughout the seated shows at the Ace next week. I'm not postponing my happiness. My fingers are crossed for sets consisting of nothing but songs from Cousin and Cruel Country.

I retract all of my whining. The package arrived today. Tracking still shows it in Raleigh, but it's here. What an infinite surprise (h/t coldasgasoline).

3 hours ago, SarahC said:

But at the same time I do think there's very clear melodic succession to OTJ. I think the melody on Infinite Surprise definitely takes a bit from Quiet Amplifier specifically the cadence. 

 

The only track I'm not googley-eyed over is Ten Dead. It's *fine* but didn't make me say "yeah buddy!" after it was over. Granted, I've only listened to the record 4 times so far. 

One of the things that made Ode to Joy such a chore for me was its lack of melody, so we'll have to agree to disagree.

When I said at least nine of ten tracks grabbed me right away, the one I wasn't sure about was "Ten Dead," so we'll have to agree to agree.

I just gave it two full listens, and I am very pleased with it. I was worried this was going to be in the vein of "Ode to Joy," but it is not. There are a lot of highlights on this album. At least nine of the ten tracks grabbed me right away.

Who plays clock on "Infinite Surprise"?

Well, my Cousin remains in "label created" limbo, so I don't think I'm going to have it by tomorrow. I might be lucky to have it by Wednesday. (You had one job, Wilcoworld.)

I certainly hope you're right that the Cousin floodgates are just waiting for the official release date to be opened. With six shows in my immediate future, I would be kind of let down if the set lists looked like this one. There are a lot of old standbys in this set-- too many for my preferences (though I'm sure they sounded great.)

6 hours ago, KevinG said:

I assume Friday it will be available on all the streaming services, no? 

Probably so but I don't have access to any of them and, even if I did, I can't listen to them on my stereo or in my car.

I just got teased by an email that my order has been shipped, but when I clicked to track the shipment, it's only at the "a label has been created" stage.

It just occurred to me that they will probably send out a download by Friday to those of us who have purchased it, so I can burn that onto a CD and have that to listen to assuming the actual CD hasn't arrived. I forgot that's what I did with Cruel Country since there was no physical release (and, in that case, they sent the downloads about a week in advance of the release date since the release date was the first day of Solid Sound).

One of the reviewers started out by writing that "Wilco has settled into a more straightforward musical style defined by stripped-back, acoustic instrumentation and Jeff Tweedy’s confessional songwriting" since Sky Blue Sky, but I don't think most of The Whole Love fits that description. Nor does Star Wars. I think sometimes these critics, who have to listen to a lot of material, have only a passing familiarity with the catalogs of the artists they review. Or things just disappear down the memory hole. I feel like every review of every album by my favorite veteran acts declares it a "welcome return to form." How is album No. 13 a welcome return to form if you previously described album No. 12 as a welcome return to form?

On the one hand, I'm encouraged by the fact that they've shipped some of these out to arrive before Friday. On the other hand, I'm discouraged because I still haven't gotten a shipping notice. I really need this no later than Friday so I can have some familiarity before the shows starting Wednesday.

8 hours ago, RainDogToo said:

ALBUM REVIEW: Wilco taking risks again on ‘Cousin,’ and it shows

https://riffmagazine.com/album-reviews/wilco-cousin/

This reviewer sells Wilco (The Album) and The Whole Love really short, not to mention Cruel Country.

Does anyone else have trouble reading reviews of music that they've never heard? I have difficulty formulating an idea of what something sounds like from a written description without actually hearing it. It makes me think of that line, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

12 minutes ago, chisoxjtrain said:

My vinyl copy is supposed to show up today! Anyone else?

Did you get an email notification? Did you preorder from Wilcoworld? I was trying to remember whether previous Wilcoworld album orders just showed up unannounced or whether they were preceded by a shipping notice.

There is a good possibility, if my preorder from Wilcoworld doesn't arrive by September 29, that I will need to go out and buy a copy of the album to be able to listen to it in anticipation of the run of shows that starts five days later, so it wouldn't necessarily be a problem that this Amoeba thing would require me to buy a second copy of the album (actually a third since I bought the CD and LP) except for the fact that they apparently won't give it to you until the day of the signing. Meanwhile, if the two copies I ordered from Wilco arrive on time, I'm apparently not allowed to bring them to Amoeba to have them signed. 

This reminds me of when I went to get a book signed by Jimmy Carter in 2015. He had published a new memoir, A Full Life, and was doing a signing in Pasadena. There were hundreds of people in line on a 100-plus degree day, and it took a couple of hours to get to the front of the line. They had signs up everywhere saying that he would only sign copies of the new book. I also had a copy of his White House Diary, and I brought it along just in case. When I got to the front of the line, the handler from the bookstore said, "He's only signing the new book." Carter looked at the other book in my hand and said, "If I wrote it, I'll sign it!" I said, "Well, it's your diary, so I hope you wrote it." He signed both books. I'm sure Wilco would be as generous if I showed up with my Wilcoworld copy of Cousin, but Amoeba might not let me in line.

I recognize the similarity the original poster identifies. Olivia Rodrigo is really talented, although this song, with the speak-singing and the Avril Lavigne chant choruses-- I'm not really sure what to think of it.

One thing that's refreshing about her is that she is very much a rock-oriented artist. There aren't many pop stars today that would fit right in on '90s alternative-rock radio, but Rodrigo would.

The lyrics definitely seem like they're from the "ransom note" method Jeff described in his second book.

9 hours ago, kidsmoke said:

More a review of the direction this album is taking the band, I guess. I just really like what I'm hearing. And I wanted a space to share reviews as they appeared, so here you go. The release date is zooming up at us so I expect you, Brian F., to post some actual reviews in this thread.

Thank you and stop nitpicking at your overly busy admin! 

 

I wasn't nitpicking! I really thought I was missing something.

Am I missing something? I see a review of a performance that mentions the new album, but I don't see a review of the album.

"Crawling is screw faster lash I blow it with kisses..."

I'd elaborate, but it's pretty self-explanatory.