The longtime Wilco frontman is all good cheer as he describes getting out of Chicago to record, touring little-known baseball stadiums – and jamming with his rocker son.
After about 10 minutes of friendly banter, you begin to wonder if it’s really Jeff Tweedy on the other end of the phone. This guy is laughing and wisecracking like he’s trying out for a comedy festival. Perhaps the newfangled phone system in his management office has accidentally connected you with someone else called Jeff Tweedy in the greater Chicago area?
It doesn’t add up. Isn’t Tweedy supposed to be a dour, unhappy, miserable cut of a curmudgeon? Isn’t this the dude who tried to cure his demons with pills and ended up in rehab? Isn’t he the band leader who kept chopping and changing the line-up like some sort of indie-rock James Brown?
Tweedy snorts with laughter once again.
“Well, it depends on who you ask,” he says about his grumpy rep. “I did an interview with someone in Spain a while ago and they said that they knew I was very, very, very sad and that they liked that.”
There's another giggle from the Windy City before he continues. "To be honest, I think a song like Heavy Metal Drummeris pretty funny, not ha-ha-ha, laugh-out-loud funny, but it's funny. Casino Queen, too, from A.M. is humorous.
“Actually, every record has had its funny track and it’s been a part of the band, but it’s not a part of the band that people have focused on before because of the perceived seriousness of a lot of the other material. I think this time we’re definitely laughing more. It might have something to do with the first song you put on a record, and the first song here has definitely got some humour.”
Tweedy is talking about Wilco (The Song), the opening salvo on their seventh album, Wilco (The Album). It's an optimstic, tongue-in-cheek battle cry, with Tweedy nodding and winking as he provides a shoulder for the masses to cry on. "Wilco," he croons to the listener, "Wilco will love you baby."
The rest of the album is just as cheery and upbeat, as befits this year's only record with artwork of a camel on a roof standing next to a table with a cake on it. What we get here is a perfect match of the band's mellow mood swings ( One Wingcould well have been plucked from their last album, Sky Blue Sky) cosying up to their more experimental side (the powerful, uneasy Bull Black Novahas some of that Yankee Hotel Foxtrothooch running through its veins).
It is also, remarkably, their first record to feature the same line-up as the album before it. Given the band’s previous form in turning a simple album release into a bit of a soap opera, are we now dealing with a drama-free Wilco?
“I don’t know where people get the idea that every Wilco record is supposed to have drama,” says Tweedy – with a laugh. “Okay, I guess, historically speaking, we’ve had our fair share of ups and downs. I’m not the master of the universe, so the next record might be completely different in that regard, though I’m not planning it that way. Let’s just say that there’s a noticable lack of drama in the eyes of people paying attention to us.”
Whatever about the lack of drama, the ambition that has driven Tweedy for more than a quarter-century – since his days as a member of The Plebes back in Belleville, Illinois – is still very much present and correct.
“Yeah, I’m ambitious, I don’t want to make the best Wilco record, I want to make the best record full stop. I know that’s impossible, but that’s part of the reason why it’s fun to keep trying.
“I’m aware, too, that I’m always competing with Wilco in the eyes of the listener and our earlier records. That’s been the way for a long time. When Wilco started, we were competing against Uncle Tupelo. It’s never changed anything about what I do when I go into a recording studio. You can only do the best you can do, and that’s what I strive for.”
One reason for the stress-free gestation of Wilco (The Album)could be that it wasn't put together in Chicago. The band found themselves in New Zealand working on a charity record in Neil Finn's studio and decided to stay on. It proved to be a good idea.
“We’d a great time in New Zealand and gotten really comfortable in Neil’s studio, and so it seemed really natural to stay down there and get some of the basic tracks down. We stayed an extra week or so and we got a lot done. It was way more efficient to do that because, strangely, we worked a lot faster than we’d ever work in Chicago.
“When you’re only responsible for feeding yourself, it makes it a lot easier to focus on just making rock music. When you’re in your hometown, though, as much as everyone around us understands that this is our job, it’s hard to stop normal life from interfering with the recording process.
“I think it’s really good and healthy to get away from all your stuff once in a while, because rock’n’roll is built on kicking against your limitations. One of the things we’ve done over the years is build this loft space in Chicago and fill it up with all the coolest gear we can find. But it’s also good to take yourself out of that environment and force yourself to work with what’s to hand, and that’s what made New Zealand such an enjoyable trip.
"It was also about the longest I've been able to stay anywhere away from home – other than Ireland, oddly enough. We were in Ireland for about a month working on the Mermaid Avenuealbum a few years ago. I have to say that New Zealand's weather beats your weather hands down."
In early 2008, Wilco took over the Riviera venue in Chicago for a couple of nights to perform their entire recorded repetoire over a few shows.
“After years of touring with this line-up,” says Tweedy, “I’ve noticed that people would request songs which we didn’t know or hadn’t played. It got me thinking, and I said to the others, why don’t we just play all these songs at the one time? If we’re going to call ourselves Wilco, let’s go and play all the Wilco songs and lay claim to all of these past records and do something that no other line-up of the band had ever done. I think this line-up plays some of those older songs a whole lot better than the line-up which created them.”
Some former members might disagree. The best known ex-Wilco player is the late Jay Bennett, the multi-instrumentalist who was publicly fired in 2001. Bennett died from a drug overdose in May, a few weeks after issuing a legal suit against Wilco alleging breach of contract and unpaid royalties.
While Tweedy contests Bennett’s claims (“he was suing me for a contract we didn’t have and over a movie I did not produce”), there is a note of sadness about the death. “Jay was a really amazing musician and he really helped Wilco to grow as a band during the years he was with us. It was a tragic, sad end.”
The disintegration in their relationship was vividly captured in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a riveting insight into how a band deal with all manner of problems, from getting dropped by their label to inner-band strife and creative conflict.
You'd imagine, then, that Wilco would be reluctant to have any cameramen in their faces for an extended period ever again. Nonetheless, the band invited film-makers Brendan Canty and Christoph Green to shoot Ashes of American Dreams, which documents the band on a tour of some colourful US venues.
"Fortunately, or unfortunately, for the film-makers, nothing extraordinary happened other than the music," says Tweedy. "Sam Jones was just in the right place at the right time with I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. The worse things got for us, the better they got for him.
“I’m not opposed to people coming round to document things. I still have a pretty laissez-faire attitude to the whole thing. I don’t think we have an image worth spending that much time and energy trying to control.”
As the new documentary follows Wilco to Nashville, Tulsa, Mobile and New Orleans, there is a strong sense of a disappearing country, where places with strong regional identities are slowly becoming more and more homogenised.
Tweedy says the film and the band’s recent tour of minor-league baseball parks are “not part of some broader band philosophy on America”, but more an attempt to show different environments to the world.
“I have an ambivalence about America, which is hard for people outside of America to grasp. People outside America see a lot of chest-thumping, and it’s very much a love or hate thing. I think most Americans are somewhere in the middle, where there are some things which feel very communal and feel like home, and other things we are deeply ashamed of.
"The whole slant of the Ashes of American Dreamsmovie and us playing these baseball parks earlier in the summer has much to do with the band's desire not to play in sterile, corporate environments if we can avoid them.They're just the kind of places we gravitate towards because they feel good to play music in.
“They’re places we see, in some romantic way maybe, as the best parts of America and they’re places which don’t really tend to exist anymore.”
These days, the Wilco frontman isn’t the only Tweedy in the music business. Spencer, his 13-year-old son, is playing drums and raising teenage hell with his own band, The Blisters.
When Tweedy talks about his relationship with his son, parental pride is very much to the fore. But there is also the sort of philosophy about making music that has served Tweedy and Wilco so well since they started out in 1994.
“We hang out and play music together all the time. I think he’s got a lot of advice from myself and my wife, who ran a rock club for many years, and he’s learned from other musicians and the guys in the band.
“I think the main thing we’ve tried to instil in Spencer is that music is something to be enjoyed. I feel I’ve tried to live my life in a way which shows that to him as much as say it to him. Music is part of your life, and it enriches your perspective and appreciation for being alive.
“Anything which interferes with that is to be shunned and avoided if you chose to make your living from music. It’s too high a price to pay if you’re going to sacrifice your enjoyment of music to get ahead.”
