Wilco : Learning How to Die

by Kot, Greg

• ISBN13: 9780307493194
• ISBN10: 0307493199
• Copyright: 2008-12-10
• Publisher: Random House Inc

Summary

The intimate story of one of the great American bands of our time, creators of the controversial masterpieceYankee Hotel Foxtrot When alt-country heroes-turned-rock-iconoclasts Wilco handed in their fourth album,Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to the band's label, Reprise, a division of Warner Brothers, fans looked forward to the release of another challenging, genre-bending departure from their previous work. The band aimed to build on previous sales and critical acclaim with its boldest and most ambitious album yet, but was instead urged by skittish Reprise execs to make the record more "radio friendly." When Wilco wouldn't give, they found themselves without a label. Instead, they used the Internet to introduce the album to their fans, and eventually sold the record to Nonesuch, another division of Warner. Wilco was vindicated when the album debuted at No. 13 on theBillboardcharts and posted the band's strongest sales to date. Wilco: Learning How to Dietraces the band's story to its deepest origins in Southern Illinois, where Jeff Tweedy began growing into one of the best songwriters of his generation. As we witness how his music grew from its punk and alt-country origins, some of the key issues and questions in our culture are addressed: How is music of substance created while the gulf between art and commerce widens in the corporate consolidation era? How does the music industry make or break a hit? How do working musicians reconcile the rewards of artistic risk with the toll it exacts on their personal life? This book was written with the cooperation of Wilco band members past and present. It is also fully up to date, covering the latest changes in personnel and the imminent release of the band's fifth album,A Ghost Is Born, sure to be one of the most talked-about albums of 2004.

Excerpts

Chapter 1 "You Have To Learn How To Die" Jeff Tweedy was sobbing as he sang. He and his bandmates in Wilco were coming off a grueling tour that had seen them play too many shows too far from home for far too long, and now they had just finished up four days of recording sessions in an Austin, Texas, studio. Listening to the playback, Tweedy could measure the toll. He could hear the depression and exhaustion in his voice, the misgivings about the life he had made for himself. Music was both the best thing that had ever happened to him and the worst. It kept him away from his wife and family for long stretches, and now he was beginning to doubt everything: his music, his marriage, the sound of his own voice. The songs held no answers; they simply channeled what was in his heart and mind. Both, frankly, had seen better, brighter days. "I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me." He heard himself sing the words as they marched past him; rather than cushioning or muffling the lyrics, the music seemed to highlight them, making them even more difficult to bear. All Jeff Tweedy could think was, "I've failed. I've let the band down. I sound like the most depressed person in the world." But he hadn't failed. He had taken the first blind leap into an album that would prove to be one of the defining moments of his and Wilco's career.Summerteethwould expose his inner world to an almost unbearable degree but, with the help of his bandmates, somehow turn it into life-affirming music. A couple of years later, Tweedy would write a song called "War on War," in which he would sing, "You have to learn how to die, if you wanna wanna be alive." In that Austin recording studio, Tweedy died a little. It was a feeling he already knew intimately. There was the moment Jay Farrar took the band they had built together, Uncle Tupelo, and tore it apart by telling Jeff Tweedy he couldn't stand working with him anymore. The moment Tweedy turned an alternative-country concert for a club full of Johnny Cash fans into a punk-rock kamikaze mission. The night Tweedy baited a British audience until they wanted to tear his fool Yankee head off. And still to come would be the moment when he found his record label didn't want the best record he'd ever made. Beneath the facade of the small-town newspaper-delivery boy that he once was, the kid who wouldn't speak unless he was spoken to, Jeff Tweedy brings a self-confidence that cannot be ignored or denied. It can be willful and sometimes almost cruel, but it is not indiscriminate or random. The personality can best be glimpsed and assessed through the music, because Tweedy is a songwriter of knee-buckling honesty. The emotions in his songs examine the heart of darkness that, to some degree, lurks in all of us. His great subject is intimacywith a lover, with a friend, with music itselfand its price. His songs teeter between bliss and oblivion: "There is something wrong with me"; "I've got reservations about so many things, but not about you"; "I am trying to break your heart"; "Playing Kiss covers, beautiful and stoned." He can ice the listener's blood with a scream; there are nights when "Misunderstood" sounds like a back-alley mugging, when his howl "I want to thank you all for nothin', nothin' at all" repeats until the veins rise like blue fault lines down his neck. Or he can cut our hearts out with a whisper. "She's a Jar" climaxes with a line that lands with a sickening thud, a corpse being dropped from a third-floor window, but it's sun