ARCHIVE / PHOTO GALLERIES
Jay Bennett of Wilco answers the door of his house in Chicago's northwest suburbs carrying a hammer in his hand. He is dressed in worn-out gray pants and a faded, grease-stained blue shirt. Long, twisted strands of blondish-brown hair dangle down either side of his face. His tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses and the small tuft of beard below his mouth lend him a bit of a beatnik air.
He is not wearing the grease-monkey outfit just for effect. Bennett likes to spend his spare time – it's hard to imagine how he has any spare time, given all of the bands and recording project he is involved with – restoring up old cars and fixing stereo equipment he's pulled out of his neighbors' garbage.After giving a quick tour of his home, Bennett heads for one of his favorite places, the garage in back where he is working on two 1963 Ford Falcons. One is a four-door that he drives regularly; the other is a badly damaged convertible, with the hood sitting atop the passenger seats.
"I'm trying to do it up in kind of show condition," he says. "I started it ... the summer before. It was in a fire. It was just god awful. It's getting pretty close to being done. I'd say if I ever got three weeks off to really dig into it."
Bennett eagerly shows off a stereo system he recently set up in his garage after buying it for a mere $16 at a local garage sale.
"I'm telling you, the garage sales and the estate sales and the rummage sales in the suburbs are incredible," Bennett says. "And garbage picking, too... This Schwinn Varsity right here – the blue Schwinn varsity that I never owned as a child? Garbage-picked that. Garbage-picked one of those other ones (bicycles). I have no shame about doing it, even if it's on the same block. I garbage-picked this lawn mower. It didn't work at all, and I rebuilt the engine with about $8 worth of parts, and it starts right up. It's unbelievable. I garbage-picked a VCR, a brand-new Sony. I used to work at an electronic repair store for about three years, and ... we did a lot of VCR repairs. It just had a tape stuck in it. You just gotta to go in there, pull one of the little belts around manually and get the tape out, and then they're usually good. That's how I know how to do all of this stuff. My dad and I worked on cars together when I was kid."
Bennett says he hates to pay to get anything fixed.
"I just cringe. Not because of the money, just because I know if I had the time and the tools, I could do it, you know?"
Bennett's desire to fix everything himself should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his musical work. He is a jack-of-all-trades on the stage and in the studio, adept at playing many instruments and recording and mixing music.
The liner notes of Wilco's CDs document the amazing variety of instruments Bennett plays in the studio.
He's a master of guitar – from standard acoustic and electric axes to the lap steel and odder varieties such as the bartione guitar and e-bow. He dabbles with many other stringed instruments, including the bouzuki, dulcimer, banjo, electric sitar, and electric and upright basses.
Bennett also plays a prominent role at the keyboards, playing everything from piano and organ to clavinet, melodica and synthesizer. That's not to mention his occasional bit parts performing on accordion, melodica, harmonica, bells, drums, shakers, tambourine, saw, and the self-invented Delayaphone.
Wilco's frontman Jeff Tweedy is the focus of most press coverage on the group – understandably, considering that he's the lead singer and that he wrote all of the songs on Wilco's first two albums. But since Bennett joined Wilco at the end of the recording sessions for the band's debut, "A.M.," he has played a critical role in shaping the band's sound. He co-wrote many of the songs that Wilco contributed to the two "Mermaid Avenue" albums of previously unreleased Woody Guthrie lyrics recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco. On Wilco's highly praised 1998 CD "Summerteeth," the songs were credited to the entire band.
For more than a year, Wilco has been recording a new album, tentatively titled "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel," at the band's loft in Chicago, where Bennett owns most of the recording equipment and a trove of instruments – " literally hundreds of guitars, about 80 keyboards," he says. Director Sam Jones has been filming the sessions for a documentary. Earlier this year, drummer Ken Coomer left the band under circumstances that still haven't been fully explained by Wilco, which brought on Glenn Kotche to replace him.
The luxury of spending months perfecting a record is quite a change from Bennett's early days with the power-pop band Titanic Love Affair on the University of Illinois campus in Champaign. In 1987, the band recorded a seven-song cassette called "Ice Cream Funeral," vividly capturing the raw power of its live performances. But the liner notes are apologetic about the hasty quality of the recording: "We started this at 2:00 p.m. June 13th and had the tapes out for our June 14th gig show... Everything is a first gig, we swear to God. Jay's voice is all fucked up so it sounds wimpy when he sings, but deal with it... We only put music on one side of the tape so you can do whatever you want with the other side, like record a Def Leppard album or something."
A few years later, while playing with Steve Pride and His Blood Kin (who were alt country before the term had been coined), Bennett was still recording on the fly. In the liner notes for the group's 1999 posthumously released CD, bassist Don Gerard recalls, "The songs included on this disc were never meant to be released on a CD and most of ‘em were recorded on sketchy equipment in a dusty basement with no 'engineer.' Jay would run upstairs, turn the tape machine on, run down and start playing."
In addition to "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel," Bennett has produced soon-to-be-released albums by Chris Burney, Australian singer-songwriter Sherry Rich (with whom Bennett co-wrote a number of songs), and an odd ensemble of trombone, upright bass, ukelele and drums played on a suitcase called The Viper and His Famous Orchestra.
Bennett and other members of Wilco played on the recent CD by Tim Easton, and Bennett is handling the keyboards and some mixing duties on a new album by popster Tommy Keene.
And oh, yeah, then there's his prodigious output of solo recordings and duets with Edward Hargrove, of the band the Kennett Brothers. And although Bennett's original band, Titanic Love Affair, had presumably sunk, there's actually a new TLA album nearly ready for release.
The following is an edited transcript of a conversation with Bennett.
Q: Tell me about your solo music.
A: I don't know that it bears much resemblance to either Wilco or TLA. TLA was a group effort, at least Ken (Hartz) and I. We wrote together in a fashion, that he doesn't write and I don't write, yet it had this signature thing to it. Anything I do without Ken isn't going to feel like TLA. It's not going to be based on big, hooky guitar riffs and things like that. It tends to be minor-key, introspective. I say that, but there's a few pop tunes...
Those songs are between seven years and one month old. I probably have six songs I try to play every time I play because I'm really proud of them. But everything else – it motivates me to finish new material. You know, I've got a show coming up on the 22nd, and I've got that one song I really like, but I've only got one verse for it. I work with Edward (Hargrove) a lot on that stuff.
Q: Are you planning to put out a CD?
A: Edward and I are doing one. This'll sound ridiculous, but our goal is to make, like, a three-CD initial release... This is exaggerating very little, but if I go and find all of my recordings from the past six years, which is maybe when I started seriously doing solo stuff, I easily have, like, 80 to 100 songs recorded. Easily. And then another hundred that are written and not recorded or just recorded on a cassette player. Of completely varying quality, but mostly good.
So Ed and I are sifting through that now. And then I'll probably pick my 10 newest songs I like and do those, too. I kind of decided that it was ridiculous after all these years of writing songs to try and say, "I want these 12 to represent me," to the people who don't know that I ever wrote any songs other than the songs I've written with Wilco. I think that's ridiculous.
I want to say, here's at least a chunk, you know? I really want to put out like 35 songs or something. And we're about halfway done with it. We're just going through old tapes and sorting out stuff.
Q: Would this be solo under your name or –
A: Probably Ed and I. We do so much together. I mean, I do most of the writing. But he's kind of like my Garfunkel. Ed's a beautiful, beautiful singer, and he can sing things that I can't sing, maybe things that I wrote, that I can't necessarily sing. He's a great harmony singer. He knows how to blend right in. He's a good right-hand man. Such a musician. He's an unbelievable singer, he has an unbelievable memory. He knows every song ever written. He's helped me out so much ever since I've known him, for about eight years. I just feel better doing something that was both of ours.
Q: If you release this on CD, will you use stripped-down arrangements similar to what you do at an acoustic show or fuller production?
A: It'll kind of be all over. There are a couple of tunes that are really done up, you know, like kind of real poppy Elvis Costello orchestration and arrangement. There's a lot of stuff where I played all of the instruments on it. The bulk of it is that. But then some of it worked best, just acoustic guitar and piano... A third of it will end up being like what you see at a solo show.
I really enjoy playing songs in that format. You don't have to fight to get your vocals heard and you can really put a lot of nuance into your voice than when you're trying to belt above a band. So if I ever went out on a little tour, I would do it stripped down. Ed and I and maybe another keyboard player or bass player. But you get the drums up there, and it becomes a rock show, and then once it's a rock show, then you feel like you have to kind of entertain in a certain way that you don't – When you're doing an acoustic show, your entertainment is just the little stuff you throw out in between songs. You don't have to jump around or anything like that.
Q: Are there particular themes you're drawn to with your lyrics?
A: I'd say there tends to be some kind of dark theme or something. Maybe a darkness combined with just a little bit of word play or something. A vague darkness, even to the tunes that are up-tempo and major key. I don't think I've ever written a song that was like, "I love you. Things are going so great." I don't know why.
Q: With other artists who are drawn to dark themes, I don't necessarily find it depressing.
A: No, no, that's the whole thing. It's not depressing. All of the lyrics on the Replacements' "Pleased to Meet Me" are super-dark lyrics but they're incredible... I think that's something that has been a trademark of great pop music for a long time: dark lyrics or angry lyrics or sarcastic or biting.
I probably don't have angry lyrics, but I have sarcastic or biting or spiteful lyrics or something, you know? Yeah, but the music is – I try to write, if not catchy melodies, I definitely write intricate melodies. I tend to write more complicated songs than when I write with Jeff for Wilco – chordally and melodically, key changes and stuff like that.
Maybe that's it. Maybe the complex nature of those melodies lends itself to a certain darkness.
Simple, three-chord songs – It was fun writing songs with the Woody Guthire lyrics. Then I was kind of able to do it, like "California Stars." Three chords, catchy little melody. But I could never write those lyrics myself.
Q: Did you feel intimidated that these were lyrics by Woody Guthrie?
A: Not at all. Every night, I'd just sit there in the kitchen with a little coffee table and my cup of coffee and start leafing through stuff. It was so casual, just sit there into a little recorder like that and throw out ideas...
Until I actually got engaged in the process, it maybe was intimidating. Looking at the lyrics and his little drawings and his handwriting and his little P.S.'s that he wrote at the end of things, like, "I wrote this on July 22, 1942, sitting at the corner..." You definitely felt like you were looking at someone's diary, at something that you shouldn't be allowed to look like.
But then once you started writing, you were like, "I'm writing with this guy. Me and Woody are writing a song together." It was just so refreshing to be writing from existing lyrics...
Q: Initially that was just going to be Billy Bragg, right?
A: Yes, Billy was involved first… Jeff and I were doing an acoustic-duo show in London and Billy came to the show. He really initially just asked us to be the backing band for his stuff. And he was like, "You know what? In the spirit of this whole thing, I think it needs to be a collaboration all the way." I don't know, we probably would have done it, just being a backing band, but you've got too many songwriters just sitting around just to be a backing band, in a project that important...
Q: Were the two albums recorded at the same time?
A: About half of the second one is from the first. It was really awkward to try to figure out how to put out that record. Those aren't outtakes. When we were sequencing the first record, we realized we had too many songs. And we realized we were leaving really good songs off the first record. I think there were 42 songs recorded.
So we decided, OK, the only way we're not going to kill each other over trying to decide what 14 or 15 end up on the album is if we say there's going to be a second. It was hard. Some of us didn't want to come out with "Mermaid Avenue 2" because that just looks like outtakes and it's not. I actually like it a little better than the first. Most of the reviews tended not to look at it as outtakes... We went and recorded six new songs, five of which ended up on it.
Q: Are you going to do a third album of Guthrie lyrics?
A: I don't think so. I don't think it would be fair to hog that material... There's probably almost another album's worth of stuff, recorded if not finished. I've got a couple things that with Nora (Guthrie's) permission I'll probably put on a solo record. John put one on his record. Things will squeak out here and there, but I don't know if there'll be another full-on record.
I don't think the legacy of Woody would be to pass it to us and then we get to keep it. Nora was gracious enough, finally she was at a place in her life where she could deal with those memories and open this up to the public. She did it very carefully. She chose Billy very carefully, and understood his decision to get us.
She was cautious. I don't think Nora's going to let just anybody see those lyrics. I don't want to hog them. They're too beautiful and there's too many great things to be done. You know, there's a hard-core rap record sitting in there somewhere. There's some nasty lyrics, as nasty as any hard-core song. There's probably a punk-rock album in there... and another couple of folk records in there. I mean, I'd love to sit there with that catalog and write all 2,000 songs. I'd do that every day if I could.
Q: What happened to Titanic Love Affair when Charisma dropped you after releasing your first album?
A: I think some of the other guys in the band got more freaked out by being dropped, not realizing that nine out of 10 bands if not more get dropped... I don't think they realized record companies throw 20 things at the wall, one sticks, then they start putting money behind it. They don't start putting money behind everything...
I think those guys equated – Ken, Lars (Gustafsson) and Mike (Hazelrigg) to varying degrees – saw Titanic Love Affair and that record contract as it. The record contract was almost like the goal, as opposed to the starting point. And therefore when that went away, you had gotten to the finish line and someone had moved it. And they couldn’t separate the band and the music from the fact that one stupid record company decided to drop us – us and 70 other people.
The Charisma roster went from 140 bands to four in a day. They dropped everybody but Jellyfish and Maxi Priest and Right Said Fred. So whoopee. But that was a blow, that was a blow to everybody. And that was a blow to me, but I think it was a bigger blow to (them). To me, like, I'm still a musician. This can still be a band. Step back.
I took a little time away from wanting to perform or really push TLA again. I definitely still have the enthusiasm for the music. There's something about the way Ken and I write together. It brings out something in me and it brings out something in him.
It's a writing partnership of several I have – Edward and Jeff and Ken – it's the most, you can't tell where it came from. It came somehow equally from both of us, but you can't pinpoint it. But I think that was a serious blow to those guys and they never quite recovered.
Q: Did TLA formally break up?
A: No, I think we kind of fizzled. I think Ken quit at one point and we thought about getting somebody else. But then after Ken quit, he moved to Chicago and then he moved back to Champaign. Mike had moved out to Portland. I said, "You want to get back together and write some songs?" So we made that third album. But we didn't play live (after that) at all.
Q: What happened between the time you were in Titanic Love Affair and Wilco?
A: The third (Titanic Love Affair) album actually came out while Wilco was recording "Being There." There's really only a year and a half of time between them. Ken and I made the third record, just the two of us. There's really only about three years in there, I guess, that we weren't playing. I was playing with Steve Pride and his Blood Kin, and we just put out an record of all this old stuff that we recorded, just a year and a half ago. That kind of documents those three years. And I was working at an electronic repair shop, kind of taking it easy. It was good. It was a really happy time in my life, actually.
Ken had a couple of other bands after that. (Now) he works at a company called Triplight that makes surge protectors for computers and stuff. But he and I are actually seven songs into a new TLA record, and there's about four more to be mixed. There's maybe one more vocal to sing.
Q: Any idea when that might come out?
A: No, no. I need to start a record label, because I have so many...
Q: I don't how you manage to do all these things.
A: I don't either. So I'm really proud of that. It's shaping up to be my favorite TLA record.
Q: Is it in the same vein as what you guys did before?
A: Yeah, it's what we do. (Laughs.) There's never any attempt in that band to push the boundaries. It was just to do what we did as best as we could. And I have no problem with that. I love Ken's voice. To hear him screaming out a catchy melody with some big, distorted melodies behind it is all I need. I don't need anything more than that.
Q: How did you end up in Wilco?
A: I joined the minute they were done recording "A.M." It wasn't even mixed yet. I had known Jeff, because the Uncle Tupelo demos were done in Champaign with Matt Allison. Matt and my friend Adam Schmitt lived together and they did it at their studio. So I'd known Jeff from those couple of weeks that he spent in Champaign, and every time he came through town I talked to him.
That band Steve Pride and His Blood Kin that I was playing in opened for Uncle Tupelo at Lounge Ax (in Chicago) and in Champaign a couple of times. And Sue Miller (the owner of Lounge Ax and Tweedy's significant other) knew me from TLA and from Steve Pride. I think it was actually Sue's idea. She was like, "You know, I've seen this guy play in a rock band and in a kind of countryish band. Why don't you call him?"
So I just got a call. It was just like, "You want to do this tour and see how it goes?" Nothing ever got more formal than that, so I guess I'm in the band.
Q: In the songwriting credits, Jeff Tweedy is credited with all of the songs on "A.M." and "Being There." On "Summerteeth," it says "All songs by Wilco." And on the "Mermaid Avenue" albums, sometimes it's "Tweedy/Bennett" or "Bennett/Tweedy." Was there a conscious decision at some point –
A: With "Summerteeth," it's just too complicated to write out who – it would have been like, "Bennnett/Stiratt/Tweedy," "Tweedy/Stiratt/Bennett," so we just put Wilco and leave a little mystery in there. Unfortunately, some people assume it's still all Jeff. But I don't know what we'll do on this record.
But I don't think Wilco's ever made a conscious decision in their lives. We spend so much time together. We have taken so long to make our records, these last two at least. Everything is given time and space to naturally evolve.
You can sidestep a lot of the decision-making. Most bands go, "On July 3 we're starting to make a record. And we have to be done on Aug. 14. And we're doing it at this studio with this engineer, and then we have a mastering date." We just start. We go to our loft, and we start recording, and before you know it, we have an album, and before you know it, it has a little direction to it. And maybe we'll re-record a song to fit in with it.
There's very little decision making. I mean, important decisions get made, but they get made really naturally. They make themselves. I don't think there was ever a conscious decision to make "Summerteeth" what it became, or to make "Being There" – I mean, "Being There" was just winging it. Those are all rough mixes. There hasn't been a conscious effort – there's been a conscious effort to make good music.
Q: What about the complaints from alt-country purists who wanted Wilco to continue playing that sort of music? Do you encounter that?
A: When I pop in on the Internet and see all of the goofballs writing about stuff. There was never much of a movement that I knew of. It's ridiculously limiting. What, are we going to pretend that we didn't grow up in the '70s listening to good pop music? It's ridiculous.
I mean just because we all happened to like good old country music – that's great music, too. We don't make those divisions that those people make, so we didn't feel like we were leaving anything behind. We never said, "No more twangy guitars" or "No more songs in 6/8."
Q: Looking at the credits on the albums, it's obvious that you're more than the guitarist. You're the band's multi-instrumentalist.
A: I guess I kind of took two people's positions. I came in as lead guitar player and took over the multi-instrumentalist (spot), too. The fun thing is getting to drum on a couple of tracks per album. So far, I've done that. I've got one on "Being There," three on "Summerteeth," one on "Mermaid 1" and one on "Mermaid 2," and I think I might get two on this record. That's still the most fun.
Q: My perception is that, at least early on, Jeff Tweedy was the main songwriter and as the multi-instrumentalist, you were the person doing a lot of the arranging and adding color to the songs. Am I oversimplifying things?
A: Yes, you are, but that's fairly accurate. It's a lot of group (effort). Just because I play piano on a song doesn't mean it was my idea to play piano on that song.
Sometimes we'll do something where we'll tell the person who plays the instrument the least well to play it, because we want it to feel like that. Tell the drummer to take a guitar solo, because it'll sound differently.
But I think, yeah, initially I was definitely responsible for – and Jeff and John play a little bit of keyboards and everybody likes to fool around with different things. I guess I'm probably the most proficient on the most number of instruments, but the way we work sometimes, it just doesn’t – this probably sounds cheesy, but we're so group-oriented that sometimes it's like, "You do it." "No, you do it." "You do it." "No, you do it." "Let me try it." "No, that sucks, you try it."
On this record, at one point we thought about how many times we have two people playing an instrument. We might have four people at a piano at once and three people playing guitar.
Q: How would you describe the new record?
A: It has elements of everything we've done in the past, and it has some new elements. I don't completely understand it yet. I haven't gotten away from it enough to understand what it is. To me, that record is still the process of making that record, which is hopefully done now.
To me, that record is the past year of my life, if not a little bit more, actually. Jeff and I started writing songs at the end of that R.E.M. tour. To me, that record is a big chunk of my life. It's really hard to say for me to say what it is, as a consumer might... It sounds like us, and it doesn't sound like us. There's no conscious move in any direction, no conscious move to stay in one place.
Q: Who were some of the people you were working with on this CD, producing and session work?
A: Us. We produced it. Myself. I did most of the engineering, and a guy named Chris Brickley co-engineered a lot of it with me. It's been an in-house deal. That's how things are allowed to evolve. We're bad about deadlines. The record's not coming out until Sept. 4. I think we missed three deadlines. I guess that's the price you pay...
Q: What takes so much time?
A: There's lots of songs written, you're melding two songs together, you're rewriting songs. You're doing seven completely different takes of one song.
Chris Brickley kept threatening that he was going to put out an album of all – we have one song on there that we did like 12 different versions of. He was going to bootleg an album of just that song.
You're doing everything. You're writing songs up until the day that you're supposed to be done. Retracking and rewriting. You're making music. You're doing what you do. It's fun. We have removed all of the crap.
Q: How were you able to do that?
A: I don't know. We have this big, giant loft with all our instruments and all of my recording gear, my 24-track and all my stuff. We don't need anybody else.
Somehow we're kind of living, on that level, this dream. That's what you dream of when you first start out. "I wish we had this giant space with all our gear and our own studio and all the time in the world." (Laughs.) I don't know why we're allowed to do that. Somebody's going to get wise one of these days.
Q: How do you see your level of success right now?
A: We get as much press as a band that sells a couple million records. Literally. We're probably getting more press than bands that sells 10 times as many records, 20 times as many records.
Q: How many copies do your records sell?
A: Between 200,000 and 300,000. Internationally, boost that by another couple hundred thousand. No breakthrough yet.
Q: Are you ambitious to break through to arena rock like R.E.M. and U2 did?
A: I guess it's hard to be ambitious about something you don't have any control over. That's not a goal. But in a perfect world, that would happen. But that can't be a goal, but there's nothing you can do to make that happen other than do what you do as best as you can do it.
Q: Will you play some of the new songs at Wilco's July 4 concert?
A: I don't know. Probably a few. I know we won't have the whole record worked up. A taste.
Q: What's the process like, once you've got the songs recorded and now you're going to play them live? Are you pretty much ready to do it, or do you need to figure out from scratch how to play the songs in concert?
A: You need to learn your own record. You can't duplicate it note for note. You need to figure out how to give the same impression. So that takes some work. And with every album, that takes more.
"Being There" was easy. Let's go play these songs again. "Summerteeth" and this record will take a little, "Who's going to play what? What line are you going to do? I'll take this line and you take this line... Originally that was on a trumpet, but I think I just can do it on the organ." It's going to take work, but fun work.
Q: Are you allowed to say what happened with Ken Coomer leaving the band?
A: (Pause.) Let me think about this. Yes, I'm allowed to, but it is still far too personal for me to talk about. I haven't talked to Ken enough about it. We've talked. Ken and I have not made our peace with it, so it is totally a 100 percent personal decision of mine not to talk about it. I don't want to talk about my friend and what happened between us.
I don't want to have to talk about what happened, the professional relationship with a really good friend of mine until he and I are really comfortable with what happened. Yes, I'm allowed to talk about. It's not like legal or it's not like, blah blah blah. It's just like, I want to sit with Ken and talk about it, go down to Nashville and talk about it with him for a couple of day, and jam in his garage together, and then, "OK, is everything cool about it?" "Yes." Then I could talk about it.
But right now it's a little personal kind of unsettledness emotionally for me. It's hugely emotional, so I wouldn't feel right talking about it for that reason.
Q: How would you describe your collaboration with Jeff? A: There have been times we said, “Hey, let’s get together and write some songs.” And then there have been times when I made these instrumental demos for him… Literally hand him a CD and, “Hey, go sing along in your car and come up with some lyrics..."
Writing with anybody is a bit of block you’ve got to get over. You’ve got to put yourself on the line and say, “Here’s this idea. What do you think of it?” You’ve kind of got to plow through that, you know? And go, “Here’s something of mine. I don’t know. What do you think?” (Imitating the response from the other songwriter:) “I think it’s cool, except I’m not sure about that thing there. Maybe that should happen twice.” Or “That melody there should go up there in the chorus.”
You’ve got to totally unpossess things, you know? I mean, because you have to feel confident about them, that you’re saying, “Hey, let’s work on this together.” But at the same time, you can’t possess them because they’re going to change...
You know, “Secret of the Sea” was a really good one at that level, and “California Stars.” Those two were moments were moments where like, “Jeff, man, I think this is pretty cool.” You know? He’s like, “But that one thing, that needs to go. You’re putting too many words in there. Can we make that a little longer? And then the melody can go up... That’s it! You did the exact thing it needed.”
But it’s still tough. You’re opening yourself up in a weird way.
Q: Many people probably expected Jeff Tweedy would have continued on as Wilco’s only songwriter, but instead he has opened it up to collaboration.
A: He didn’t need to. I’m glad he did. He could have really easily said, “This is my band.” That would have really changed the whole vibe of the band, too. I’m not saying people would have quit or run off or whatever, but it would have been different. It would have been like, “Oh, that’s the band I’m the guitar player in.”
I think he was true to his word in wanting it to be a group. I think people give us less credit for being a group… Jeff almost resents – “resents” isn’t a good word, something less strong than “resents” – some of the attention he gets, on a certain level. You know, “Jeff Tweedy and the boys.” I think those things offend – again, that’s too extreme of a word, but whatever – those things offend him as much as they do us, to his credit.
Q: Do you own the studio? A: We have a studio at a loft, the bulk of which is mine. I’d say 90 percent of the gear is mine. Occasionally, Wilco will buy an item. “That compressor is Wilco’s.” But most of it is mine.
Q: Since college, you’ve been producing music in addition to playing it.
A: It’s always gone hand in hand. I can’t separate the two. Since Day One, I couldn’t be the guy who just, “All right, I’m playing. Come over and record it.” …
Q: What is good production, in your mind?
A: Appropriate. I’ve definitely a fan of a certain level of fidelity. I like things to sound good. But my definition of fidelity is probably a little outdate. I want it to sound good, but not glossy. Just appropriate.
Q: You don’t have a trademark sound?
A: No, just like I don’t think I have a trademark anything. Your trademarks tend to be your limitations. A trademark is just a good way of casting a spin on your limitations… Once you have a trademark, you can’t learn anymore. If you’re constantly evolving and learning, your trademark is going to go away…
Someone like Tchad Blake has a total signature mixing sound. He’s pigeonholed now, as much I love what he does. There’s other people who can go, “Hey, get the Tchad Blake sound.” “OK, I can do that.” Everybody can do it now. But then nobody’s going to go to Tchad Blake and go, “Let’s get some other kind of sound.”
It’s just a blast for me. I love it. I probably love it almost as much as playing and writing and stuff. I love recording bands and mixed bands and producing. The trouble comes when you’re doing all of those: recording, producing, writing and playing. Then you’re like you’re wearing four hats and you just want to have a meltdown occasionally. A couple of times during this Wilco record it was like “Aaaaaah!” But I bring it on myself, I guess.
ALL CONTENTS © BY ROBERT LOERZEL. PLEASE CONTACT ME FOR PERMISSION TO PUBLISH PHOTOS OR ARTICLES.
