Room at the top

“Moving forward through flaming doors / You have to lose/ You have to learn how to die / If you wanna be alive.” – Wilco, ‘War On War’, from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

And thus spake Jeff Tweedy, who offers his two cents (or for those in Euro-land, two cent) on the meaning of life, love, death and the aphrodisiacal nature of heavy metal on the new Wilco album, the enigmatically-titled Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. hotpress spoke to Tweedy in his home in Chicago to tease out some of the essential (and some thoroughly trivial) questions.

So, Jeff, this idea of having to die before you can live: it sounds like a fairly sound philosophy of life to me.

“I think it’s a pretty important lesson to learn and to stay connected to in your life,” asserts Tweedy, “not necessarily a gloomy sense of mortality but a liberating sense of the ephemeral nature of life itself. I think you have to remind yourself to participate in it; and be active in the creation of it.”

If we all lived forever, we’d get really bored pretty quickly…

“Right. It’s the only way anything gets done: people knowing they only have a certain amount of time.”

Given the esteem in which Tweedy’s previous band, Uncle Tupelo – the touchstone of the American alt.country movement – is held, it’s fair to say that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the first record he’s made in his career which has caused heads to be scratched and goatees to be stroked. Even Wilco’s collaboration with Billy Bragg on the Woody Guthrie archive, Mermaid Avenue, resulted in a Grammy nomination.

Some think YHF too esoteric and hard going, although others have declared the new record a misunderstood masterpiece. Wilco’s record company, Reprise, took the former view and refused put it out. Tweedy bought back the master tapes and waited till he found a suitably enthusiastic bidder. It ended up, ironically, on another subsidiary of Warners, Nonesuch.

“We changed label because they hated our record! They asked us to change it and we kinda liked our record… so they told us to leave! Though, ironically, in Europe we’re still working with the same people. The mother company (Warners) ended up paying for the same record twice so they must have really hated it!”

Interestingly, Tweedy made Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – which was partly engineered by cult Chicago producer/musician Jim O’Rourke (whose pedigree includes work with Sonic Youth, Stereolab and Smog) – available on the web when he got the initial brush-off from Reprise. So he has no problem with fans downloading his music from the internet?

“Not necessarily, no,” he answers. “I think there are a lot of people that are really afraid of that. But the way I see it, people don’t want to shut down libraries just because people can read books for free.”

One song on the new album, ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’, brings an air of levity to proceedings. I seem to recall a few years back at a Wilco gig in Whelan’s that a grizzled, pony-tailed roadie ended up taking the mic for a cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’…

“I seem to remember something like that alright,” laughs Tweedy. “On ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ I was bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t a heavy metal teenager because they look like they had a lot more fun than I did. They weren’t bogged down with this supposed superiority and seriousness of punk rock – and indie rock – and the things that came out it. I admired the bands with the big hair and the spandex. In retrospect, I wish I could go back and appreciate them more.”