JT Interview for The Age prior to Oz Gigs

[Albert Tatlock]

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/parts-of-the-whole-20130314-2g2q3.html

 

 

Parts of the whole

• Date
• March 15, 2013

Michael Dwyer

Wilco's unique place in American music is more alternative than country by a million road miles.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/parts-of-the-whole-20130314-2g2q3.html#ixzz2NWw5l0GE

 

Jeff Tweedy is mildly amused that the ''country'' label still comes up in the genre box when you buy Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on iTunes. It's a sign your computer hasn't been listening very closely, since that album confused Reprise Records to the point of expulsion in 2002.

 

It's that long since I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film about Wilco opened eyes and ears on the international festival circuit. The documentary about the making of the album, its rejection by the major label that paid for it, and its subsequent popular success made the cult Chicago band poster boys for the triumph of artistic vision over the strictures of corporate categories.

 

One of the first albums to be streamed free on the internet, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot eventually sold half a million copies in the US, despite being deemed unmarketable by the label that dropped it. Later, when Rolling Stone named it the third best album of the decade for its evolution of ''rock tradition, electronics, oddball rhythms and experimental gestures'', there was no mention of the c-word.

 

''I like the period when 'rock music' was a good-enough catch-all in terms of how to describe what you do,'' says Tweedy, the band's singer and songwriter. ''Within that, there was a willingness to go along for the ride and it could be anywhere. What it meant was you were doing something liberated and expressive in some way - and amplified. Now that's not good enough. There are countless subgenres. I still think that the goal should be to stake a claim to more territory for rock music as a whole.''

 

In that regard, The Whole Love opens its arms and its heart about as wide as a rock band can. Even after seven previous Wilco albums and four more going back 20 years with pioneering ''alternative country'' band Uncle Tupelo, the sense is that this one contains everything Tweedy and company have to give.

 

''You're not doing it right if you don't feel like that at the end of a record,'' he says. ''But yeah, there was some idea that the record had a lot of latitude and that would be an appropriate title for it.

''There's also just something about … the emptiness of the word 'whole' that I find interesting. The sound of the word is so counter to the meaning, especially when it's a synonym.''

 

You can see that kind of poet-guy talk drawing blank stares in a marketing meeting. The ''hole'' to which Tweedy refers obliquely has nothing to do with pigeons and everything to do with the emptiness at the heart of the artist.

 

From the opening track's grinding mechanical gears and yearning references to T.S. Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land to the long, warm bath of One Sunday Morning, the point of the journey is to fill that hole to overflowing.

The weird machine sound at the beginning of the album, Tweedy reveals, is ''the sound of a hard-drive starting up. I thought it was a cold and eerie sound to start the record with: the sound of data dying. The idea is to try to work towards the warmest point in the record, which I think is the last song.''

 

The 12-minute duration of One Sunday Morning came as a surprise, he says. Recorded in one take as he walked the band through it, the accident speaks volumes about the creative ease within this Wilco line-up, stable for nearly 10 years since the ructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. ''That's pretty awesome when you can get time to contract like that,'' Tweedy says.

 

It's 18 months since The Whole Love arrived on Wilco's new, self-owned label, dBpm, and just over a year since it landed on numerous best-of-2011 polls. In that time, Tweedy's priorities have shifted from the magic of the studio - ''the most fulfilling thing that I can imagine'' - to the long road that is his band's lifeblood.

 

''Albums usually stop being so wonderful when the world gets a hold of them,'' he says, drily. ''There's always a couple of weeks, maybe a month, when nobody's heard it and it's really wonderful to drive around in your car and feel satisfied that you made something so beautiful.

 

''Then people start to weigh in. Somehow it's not you any more. It's just obsolete in some weird way. You have to start playing the songs live to have any connection with them.''

The theme of connection is hard to miss at wilcoworld.net. The ''causes'' tab lists close to 100 community affiliations the band has forged on the road, from Happyland Preschool in Culver City to Christchurch earthquake relief in New Zealand.

 

Their cottage industry is a playground unto itself. The Whole Love was released on cassette in 2012, for example, with different covers designed by fans using a specially devised Hipstamatic app and proceeds donated to a children's charity in Chicago.

 

Then there was The Incredible Shrinking Tour of Chicago, a free audio-enhanced e-book commemorating their marathon home-town run of December 2011 with poster art, photos, set lists and dressing room rehearsal footage with Mavis Staples and Nick Lowe.

 

The piano-roll version of the album, ''hand-punched in Munich [on] 30-gram onion paper'', was their marketing department's master stroke: ''Wilco pride themselves on authenticity and a respect of the American musical tradition,'' went the website pitch from someone identified as a Chief Wilco Strategist, ''so what better way to honour that heritage than to listen to The Whole Love on a barely functioning piano in a dusty antique store.''

The news hit on April 1: a gag, clearly, on the traditionalists.

 

Tickets for Solid Sound, Wilco's very own annual three-day music and arts festival in Massachusetts in June, are now on sale for an astonishingly generous US $149 ($114). This year Neko Case, the Dream Syndicate, Yo La Tengo and loads more will help them define ''the full picture,'' Tweedy says, of ''all the different aspects we like to do as a band'', from films, art and author talks to backyard beekeeping and ''bare-chested pickling''.

''Music is obviously at the centre of it but there's also something nice about trying to be creative about how you go about your business, how you present your view of the world and how you interact with your audience,'' he says.

 

In Wilcoworld, fans enjoy a standing invitation to request songs for forthcoming gigs and leave personal dedications. In every city, the band crunches that list with set lists from previous visits to ensure a unique rapport with every port of call. ''I always look at an audience as the other half of the song equation,'' Tweedy says.

Melbourne will be about the 150th audience on this tour to help The Whole Love add up to something bigger than iTunes, cassettes and e-books. That's enough love to fill a pretty big hole. But Tweedy has confidence more work is coming. ''You always end up with the feeling you could do something better and I'm very grateful that that's the way my mind works. I'd hate to feel like I'm done.''

Wilco play Hamer Hall, the Arts Centre, Melbourne on March 27 and 28.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/parts-of-the-whole-20130314-2g2q3.html#ixzz2NWvhoUQO