Brian F.

1 hour ago, dagwave said:

"You Never Know" Sirius Howard Stern promo running frequently.

 

Things I never thought I'd hear for $500, Alex

 

 

and I love it.

It's Wilco's only number one song! (It hit No. 1 on Billboard's Triple-A chart, which means it was a big fish in a very small pond.)

2 hours ago, BeneathTheOldSnow said:

Spoilers: 

 

 

 

Sounds like the twitter clip is Pittsburgh! (Earlier version is on Starship Casual/Tweedy Show)

Thank you. I knew this sounded familiar but couldn't place it. I was worried they had plagiarized somebody.

9 hours ago, u2roolz said:

It’s entirely possible, but I think it’s more of a case of Susie asking Jeff what the name of the song was and him saying something like “I haven’t decided on Child Soldier or Soldier Child yet.” 
 

The lyrics go “I fought like a child
Soldier fights to forget
What it’s like to be home.” , according to WilcoWorld. 
 

I can see from the lyrics how it could have gone either way, but I also haven’t listened to the two Tweedy Show versions in a bit either. Possible he flipped “child” and “soldier” in the lyrics. 

I was just having some fun trying to imagine a jaunty, Sesame Street-style version of "Soldier Child." (For some reason, the sound of "Outta Mind (Outta Sight)" always makes me think of the theme song from Sesame Street.)

Maybe "Soldier Child" and "Child Soldier" will end up like "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" and "Outta Mind (Outta Sight)."

The comparison to Star Wars and the description of "A Bowl and a Pudding" have me thinking that song might be this album's "You Satellite." I don't really want another "You Satellite," but I'll keep an open mind. (Or an "Open Mind," anyway.)

This is greatly appreciated. Since I am not on Instagram, I have not seen many episodes of the Tweedy Show. (By the time they showed up on YouTube, the backlog was overwhelming.) This one-stop shop for versions of the new tracks will come in very handy. Thanks!

It just goes to show how subjective it all is. 5hake1tOff is not a fan of Wilco (The Album) or The Whole Love, but I'm a huge fan of the former and Tatlock is a big fan of the latter. (And I've never felt let down by a Pearl Jam or U2 album, but obviously I'm in the minority on that. There are clunker songs, for me, but not clunker albums by those artists.)

Ironically, Wilco, as much as I love them, might be an exception to my strongly held theory that listeners' tendency to lose interest as an artist's career progresses is more about the listeners than it is about the artists. When I look back over Wilco's career, I feel comfortable saying that the first four albums (A.M. through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) are better than the next four albums (A Ghost Is Born through The Whole Love), which are better than the last four albums (Star Wars through Cruel Country). It's all relative, of course-- Summerteeth is my favorite, and Wilco (The Album) and Cruel Country are also standouts for me-- and there's a high standard involved-- I'd take Wilco's ninth-best album over the best album by 99 percent of other bands.

Then again, Wilco really hasn't been the same band across the 28 years. Jeff is the constant (along with John), but you could easily imagine a world where each phase of the band had a different name, Jack White-style, and then we'd view the arc very differently.

Hear, hear re: Western Stars. I've really enjoyed almost all of Bruce's 21st-century output, but that album is a real standout. Did you see the film he did featuring a live performance of the full album in a barn on his property in New Jersey? It was outstanding.

I hope I didn't come across as flaming anyone. I'm just trying to lay out a long-gestating theory as to why a lot of people have a tendency to give new music short shrift: that it often has less to do with the quality of the music and more to do with the diminishing time people have to devote to it as they get older (although sometimes, sure, the new music really isn't up to snuff). There have been a couple of people on the Pearl Jam fan-club message board who have said that they listened to Pearl Jam's most recent album once and never went back to it. (Some of these fans would literally devote more time to standing in line to buy a poster at a show than to listening to the band's latest album.) It really puzzled me that someone would pay 40 bucks a year to belong to a band's fan club and, at the same time, only give that band's new album one listen before giving up on it. The explanation is that they stay in the fan club so that, every two or three years, they can get good seats to see the band play songs that came out in the 1990s and go get a beer when the last twenty-five years of the band's catalog comes up on the set list.

I worked with a guy a long time ago who offered to sell me the second Coldplay album the day after it came out. He had absolutely loved their first album but he said he couldn't get into their second album. I was like, "But it just came out yesterday?! How can you know on day two that you can't get into it?!" (It was also funny because the lead single from the second album, "In My Place," was strikingly similar to "Yellow," the breakthrough hit from the first album that he loved so much.)

This is something that kind of fascinates me-- how even an artist's biggest fans can often have decreasing interest in the artist's music as they move deeper into their career-- and you hit on something in your last sentence that I think is really significant. Namely, that your time for music is limited. This has come up a lot in the context of Pearl Jam (the only band I've seen more than Wilco), where many of the dues-paying members of their fan club seem to have very little interest in anything the band has done since 1998 (basically, everything after their first five albums), but it's very common with a lot of artists (and there's a Wilco version of it that centers on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). I have long maintained that this tendency is generally not about the quality of the artist's material (although it can be), but more about the listener. Often, the bands that people love the most are the bands they discovered when they were young and unencumbered by life's more serious responsibilities, which gives them the time to marinate in albums, listening to them over and over and over again. As they get older, and job and family responsibilities start to eat away at their personal time, it's much more difficult to devote the time to a new album. And if a new album comes out and doesn't immediately grab them, it gets set aside quickly. Most of us just don't give music the same time and patience as we get older. I also think that the shift to streaming exacerbates this phenomenon. When people had no choice but to buy albums in order to hear them, they felt more invested in them and were less quick to set them aside. And I think a lot of streaming consumption is done while simultaneously engaged in some other activity and it can make it harder to do the kind of active listening that allows you to really fall in love with an album.

For me, with an artist like Wilco (or Pearl Jam), it's not a decision as to whether to buy a new album. Given their track records and my thirty-year histories with both bands, I'm purchasing those albums even if I haven't heard a note. And then I am making the time to listen to those albums, which generally hasn't been difficult because every one of their albums has grabbed me pretty much right away-- with two exceptions, both by Wilco: Schmilco and Ode to Joy. But even as far as those two albums are concerned, I felt like I owed it to myself and to Wilco to give them a lot of runway. (And I don't have a lot of the things that eat away at people's time, like a smartphone or social media or children.) I listened to Ode to Joy every day for about six months trying to find things to appreciate about it, and I did find some things to appreciate about it even if, in the end, it just doesn't measure up to the rest of their catalog for me. 

With respect to the money aspect, that's another thing. Again, we have certain financial obligations as we get older that we don't have when we're younger (although, on the other hand, we generally make more money when we're older). And the price of LPs is often at a premium, but I note that CDs are still pretty much a bargain.

7 hours ago, Albert Tatlock said:

Indeed. The last 5 years of strummy strum strum has left me, well not exactly cold but struggling to actually remember any song apart from Quiet Amplifier. That may be also due to the onset of senility on my part though. I always admired JT for the melodies but they haven't grabbed me in that time. Evicted sounded to me like being on the path back to excitement but not at the final destination yet. This indication is much more like it.

I hear this with respect to Schmilco and Ode to Joy, but I don"t feel like it describes most of Cruel Country. 

29 minutes ago, calvino said:

Tweedy using a vocoder may be interesting (or maybe not). I don't think he used one before.

 

It kind of sounds like he's using one on "Unlikely Japan," but maybe it's just tape manipulation.

Wilco: Now with Saxophone!

(Per the credits.)

20 minutes ago, Madcap said:

If I order from bandcamp I get the download which is key since Wilco stopped providing them with vinyl purchases.

If you want to stream it, why do you need a download? I thought that the way streaming worked was that you can listen to it on demand.

If you bought the CD, you'd have the physical release and you could also rip the individual tracks to listen to on your phone or wherever, no?

Incidentally, we live in a strange world where I'm old-fashioned because I favor the late 20th-century technology of the CD over the late 19th-century technology of the LP. 

10 minutes ago, Madcap said:

Hoping that the subsequent tracks are a bit weirder, but I like it.  

 

Also wish that I could order the vinyl off bandcamp.  They didn't offer that for CC either and I like to stream and have the physical release!

Can't you just buy it elsewhere? Order it from the band or via a different retailer?

I usually order the CD directly from the band, but they have been a little unreliable when it comes to shipping it so that you receive it by release day. With tickets to see several shows starting five days after release date, it's really important that this arrives on time so I will have had a chance to listen to it before the shows.

Just now, lost highway said:

I found it on Spotify at 11pm mountain time. Listened and enjoyed again. Then I wondered, did Cate le Bon produce this song?

I was told by someone today that she produced the whole album.

5 minutes ago, u2roolz said:

I meant that it will hit YouTube, once it hits midnight in your area. Wherever that may be. It most likely shows up as unavailable for those on the West Coast. 

No, it's up on the west coast. That's where I am. If a page is active on YouTube, it's active everywhere.

I wasn't meaning to sound pedantic. I was just trying to let people who might not have realized it know that they don't have to wait until midnight to see it if they're not on the east coast.

Individual tracks are listed for $1.29 on Amazon, but only "Evicted" is actually available for purchase now. Other tracks say "not yet available." I didn't check them all, but I assume it's the same set of tracks as leaked out before.

25 minutes ago, u2roolz said:

Evicted is officially on YouTube on the East Coast and the album is available for pre-order on iTunes, along with Evicted for purchase right now. What a fun day today was! 
 

edit: You can see the album artwork both places. Looks super cool.

There's only one YouTube, so I think that means it's available worldwide.

It has been up for 16 hours and only has 52 views, so word has definitely not gotten out.

(I commented on YouTube that the cover looks kind of like Toomgis from the AMPM ads, for those who are familiar. Hopefully, this is because the album contains Too Much Good Stuff.)

They just said they're going to play it next just after 1 p.m. CDT.

How big is Brooklyn Made compared to Largo (which is, officially, 284 seats)? I was wondering about this while marveling at these sets and the lack of repeats. From a strictly selfish personal perspective, this is what I hope to see during the Largo runs as an attendee of the entire run, but I recognize that most of the people at any given show are there for that show and that show only. At Largo this past January, Jeff had not repeated a song through Night 1 and the main set of Night 2. When he came out for the Night 2 encore, I gave him the "Little Lies" 45 (which he had played on Night 1), and he asked me if I wanted him to play the song. I started to say no, since he had played it the night before, but he started playing it anyway so what ended up coming out was something like, "No, that's O.K.... Go right ahead!" Anyway, I was afraid I had blown the whole no-repeat thing for everyone (although he ended up repeating several songs across the four nights which leads me to think that was always the plan).

I like the term "acoustic shredding." That should be the new "unplugged."

1 hour ago, lost highway said:

 

I take this as confirmation that the album is done. At this point we're just waiting for whatever manufacturing and marketing route they've chosen (wait for vinyl, or drop it digital with vinyl preorders). The real question is if Nick is quietly a forum member and if he's prepared to share some of his impressions of the album with us!

Don't forget the third option: release the CD. Don't hold the CD hostage to the vinyl.

17 hours ago, kidsmoke said:

 

Hovering how? I'm at this & even basically know where my seat is, but all I can seem to see is the view from what I believe to be my seat. Explain it to me like I'm 5. 

Are you looking on a PC or iphone? I have an android and I see no seat numbers.

By the way, I know you mean you have an Android phone, but I enjoy imagining that you have an actual android. 

I'm looking on a PC. (They'll have to pry the smartphone I don't have and never will have from my cold, dead hands!) If you scroll the cursor over the little green dots, the seat numbers pop up.

If it doesn't work for you, just email me your seat number and I'll tell you where it is.

Scribex6, you're my hero! I looked at that map this morning and never thought to hover over the seats. Now that I see that it has seat numbers when you do that, it turns out that all of my Ace seats are either right on the aisle or two seats off the aisle.

8 minutes ago, kidsmoke said:

Yes, Pasadena Julie!

Well at least you're inside the venue, right? Or should I say, left? 

 

Also just a note...somebody really needs to work up a decent Ace seat map! That thing was useless. Blurry and unreadable. I still don't really know where one pair of my seats is...orch left but how left I don't know. Needs further research. (So maybe I shouldn't find your situation so funny until I check my own.)

Yeah, I had the same problem. I couldn't find any numbered seating map anywhere on the internet. The only thing I was able to find out is that the rows get longer as they go back (i.e., some of the front rows are only partial rows). For a couple of shows, we got seats 31-32 and I'm assuming they're also on the outer edge whereas there's a show where we got 13-14 which are probably closer to center.