With polished skills and shiny new tools, Wilco go to work as rock & roll landscapers.
“Glenn, show him your Garden Weasel,” Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy says. Drummer Glenn Kotche whips out his newest noisemaker. The Weasel’s chromed spikes, it turns out, make pixie-like tinkles. Wilco’s studio on the third floor of an old Chicago industrial building (mailbox label: FOXTROT TOURING CO.) is stuffed with more traditional gear: a hammer dulcimer, a Mellotron (a vintage keyboard favored by the Beatles) and innumerable guitars along walls; in some areas, speaker cabinets are the walls. “I love this place,” says guitarist Nels Cline, who sleeps on a bunk bed there when he’s in town. “It’s like a clubhouse!”
Tweedy insists, however, that the new record is less about the band’s beefed-up rock & roll rumpus room and more about his personal restlessness and desire to shake up the way he shapes his sonic landscapes (“What does a spurned lover sound like? Or what do these hills sound like?” he ponders in Wilco’s new DVD).
The band has always played live in the studio, feeding off one another’s energy as tape rolled. This time, Tweedy came in with 12 songs already composed. Others mostly contributed overdubs, he says. As Cline puts it, “It’s us collectively arranging Jeff’s songs.”
On the last day of recording, Cline finishes the final guitar track on a song called “One Wing.” Tweedy ducks out with his two young boys and returns alone a bit later, lolls on a leather couch with a furrowed brow and listens to completed songs for the first time. “I’ll Fight” is an up-tempo ballad with his dour refrain of “I’ll die for you” sweetened by B-3 organ bleats. On “Deeper Down” Kotche draws ethereal tones from malleted cymbals. Cline lays down gorgeous lap steel and electric leads that sound at once country, Andalusian and be-bop. “There’s a lot less finger-wiggling,” he says of his usual frenzied jamming. But, Tweedy adds, “There are a lot of lawn implements.”
ALL ABOUT OUR ALBUM
Producer: Wilco
Studio: Wilco HQ, Chicago
Last album: Sky Blue Sky, 2007
This album: TBD