Where there's a Wilco, there's a way

As we join Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and longtime bass player John Stirratt, they're gearing up for the Solid Sound festival in North Adams, Massachussetts, an all-day extravaganza curated by the band, which will feature a full headliner set plus numerous side projects.
"It's actually been pretty fun for us,” Jeff says. “The management team have been bearing the brunt of the headaches, but as far as the band goes we've had a lot of fun picking the acts and having our every last whim catered to. It's an incredible place to go to, even when there isn't a Rock Fest. But I'm really looking forward to Belfast too, I've never been."
Wilco, in case you hadn't noticed, have in recent years evolved into the kind of avant-country live prospect that might prompt comparison with Neil & Crazy Horse or the Grateful Dead.
"Well, that's great company to be in in anyone's estimation,” Tweedy says. “We've had our heads down for so long staying busy... I guess basically all I can say is I've never really believed that rock 'n' roll meant you didn't have to work. I like working. I want to work. Every great band I can think of, most of them were the hardest working bands, bands that put out three records a year, a lot of touring, and obviously had a real passion for that side of things. Luckily we've been able to live within our means and that's helped us stay on top of it for a long time. I feel we've worked really hard to put on better shows every year. I'm really grateful people come out to see us play."
Indeed, many's the great band who went to the dogs – literally – when they started reinventing themselves as country squires.
"I don't think it's good for anyone to be taken out of their milieu,” Tweedy declares. “To be sold on an idea that you've worked hard for some sort of luxury, I don't buy it, I don't think that it's ever helped anybody very much in the long run. Everybody gets tired, it's good to take a vacation, but I always think a good vacation is one that ends with wanting to get the hell out of paradise."
"I don't know if we'll ever feel that we can't take on water," adds John Stirratt. "There's a feeling that there's a certain permanence to it, but we try not to take anything for granted. It's been such a journey, especially in the late '90s and early 2000s, picking up this life of its own, and I do feel like it's a micro Grateful Dead thing, due to the fact that it's like the audience has created their own culture around the show. It's funny y'know, there's definitely this old guard of fans, but over time there's been people dipping in and out of the fanbase. Sometimes we might fixate on some of the bad press, but I know there are people that have stuck by us on every record, and I'm thankful for that. In a way our most inaccessible record has been our most successful,Yankee Hotel Foxtrot being a pinnacle of sales."
Certainly, the story of Wilco's fourth album speaks volumes about the music business. The band's label Reprise, a subsidiary of Warners, rejected the record. As part of a buyout deal Wilco retrieved the rights to the recordings and streamed them on their website, before selling the record to Nonesuch, another Warners subsidiary. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot then became the biggest selling record of their career.
"A lot of the label reaction, there was this sort of disbelief that this had happened,” John recalls. “The writing was on the wall before that, everyone could see it, but it's always a jarring experience to see the death of an industry."
History repeated with last year's eponymous album, Wilco's seventh, which was leaked before release. The band responded not with clampdowns but by streaming it. The result: a Billboard Top 5 hit. People obviously appreciate getting a sniff of the merchandise ahead of purchase.
"If it's good especially,” John affirms. “I always think of the parallel of Hollywood not previewing movies. Whenever you see that, you're afraid of word of mouth. It's like, 'What do you have to hide?' If something's good, people will want to invest in it. The difference is now the quantity of people buying records. But how are people going to want to buy something if they don't hear it? That was the positive side of it from our standpoint. With Yankee Hotel Foxtrot it was something as innocent as trying to sell a tour."
Wilco, incidentally, was recorded in Neil Finn's studio in Auckland, New Zealand, a spontaneous relocation rather than the result of any grand plan.
"It was kind of a whim,” Jeff explains. “We were already down there and we'd already written and demoed most of the record, so it was just an opportunity to stay there longer and knock out the basic tracks instead of going back to Chicago, where it was 20 below zero. We were in the southern hemisphere in summer time. But we were reminded that sometimes it's a very fortunate thing to be able to take yourself out of your normal surroundings."
Wilco was, by the band's own admission, a very ambiguous record.
"On a philosophical front, as far as I've been able to gather about the world, the more ambiguity you can tolerate the happier you're gonna be in your life,” Jeff says. “Absolutes grow out of terror, out of fear, and that's no way to live your life. There's always an intellectual lie too."
So was the album's prevailing atmosphere a response to the political and social climate of the past eight years in America?
"I'm sure it's in there somewhere. I've always hesitated to make any overt political statements in music, I always looked at it as its own country, its own place, making stuff that's squarely on the side of creation rather than destruction. Melodies carry an enormous amount of information that is impossible to get at any other way. You can't tell somebody a melody, they have to hear it. And for some reason that I don't know will ever be understood, you can hear a lot of environment and emotion in a melody. Most people don't really like emotions, so music is kind of a safe country to visit if you want to experience emotion with a little bit of distance. I've definitely been pretty miserable for eight years and now somewhat frustrated in the last two years. So I think it's bound to be in there somewhere, it's so pervasive in our culture right now, this maddening idea that facts don't matter anymore."
Last question then: what can Wilco diehards expect from the upcoming Belfast show?
"Well, playing a place for the first time does have a certain influence,” John concedes. “In a way you can kind of do anything you want. We do tend to look at setlists from previous shows and avoid playing the same songs twice in a five year period, so it's really kind of liberating. But on the other hand, we do have a few points in the set we touch on in every show, maybe five or six songs. The repertoire is so big now we try to touch on every record. There's a website that we consult quite a bit called Wilcobase and they have every setlist from every show we've ever done. It's been a great resource... But I'm afraid to look at the overall number of gigs!"

Wilco play the Open House Festival in Belfast on
September 10.