Alright, this is it: the final frontier, the home stretch. With only that last round of papers and unfashionably late exam, !Georgetown Day¡ is so close you can taste it. This playlist will help you relax, buckle down, and get through the rest of this semester. See you on the other side!
Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions, 1942
After all the champagne is gone and the confetti swept off the floor, we’re faced with a brand new year and a second wind of optimism. This year, you’ll start running, you’ll quit smoking, you’ll waste less time, you’ll kick television, you’ll love more and eat less. Whether you’re trying to save up or get your weight down, as long as your resolutions last, here’s your soundtrack. Full track list after the jump! Read More »
There’s just something about dysfunctional musical relationships that capture the imagination—the way that great music so often comes from talented musical minds on the outs with each other, outgrowing one space and pushing each other back and forth for control of it. The 2002 documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, chronicling the making of the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, manages to capture such a clash between Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett. The Tweedy-Bennett songwriting team produced many of Wilco’s most memorable musical moments in spite of—or maybe because of—the growing tension in their relationship. Years later, the Ashes of American Flags documentary captured quite a different dynamic. The group, four years into what is now the longest run of any lineup in the band’s history, had come a long way from the arguments and migraines. In their place, we got longtime bassist John Stirratt offering around soundcheck cookies and Tweedy commenting on drummer and father-to-be Glenn Kotche’s habit of sitting on the bus hi-lighting parenting books. If the chaos of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the sound of a band straining at its seams, the straight-forward 70s rock of 2007’s Sky Blue Sky and its underwhelming follow-up Wilco (The Album) came to be heard as the sound of this new comfort, or worse, complacency. Read More »
When frontmen go on solo tours as rumors of new albums swirl, there is a good chance they’ll road-test some possible material on you. These performances used to be intimate moments: an artist sharing something that was, at that point in time, reserved only for those lucky enough to be in the audience. But now that anyone can whip out their phone, press record, and have it uploaded to YouTube by the time the next song begins, these moments have become a little less confidential. And now we’re in on it, too.
Wilco tours almost constantly, and it feels like when they aren’t on the road, frontman Jeff Tweedy is. While the Chicago-based band takes some time out to record its eighth studio album to be released later this summer on its own label, dBpm, Tweedy took a short tour around the Great White North and surrounding states with two new cuts in tow that may or may not give us any sense of the shape LP8 will take. Read More »
When a musician is tied to a band with a distinct sound and reputation, side projects tend to be the quickest reprieve from expectations. They are chances to experiment and collaborate in low profile, low pressure environments. When long-time Wilco and former Uncle Tupelo bassist John Stirratt approached Pat Sansone with a collection of his own songs in the late 90s, the resulting album, 2001’s The Green Hour, could have been the end of the road—a quick outlet for Stirratt’s own musical vision. However, nearly a decade and four albums later, their project, The Autumn Defense, has grown into its own sound and out of the scope of a standard, short-term side project, pairing a relaxed and intimate approach with the continued growth and focus of a full-time project.
Re: Stacks – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by WGTB Blog
Catherine takes a look at the Wilco mega-hit Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in this first installment of ‘Re: Stacks,’ an article where we learn about the intimate relationships between listener and performer.
The dog days of summer are, quite literally, a drag, and they have officially Arrived. If July was the joyful carefree summer of your youth, then August is a half-life of bided time and listless suspension, caught apathetically between enjoying the last few weeks of summer sun and ushering it along to something new and possibly better and ultimately not really giving a damn either way whether time slows down or speeds up, because if the augustine humidity indicates one thing it is that nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing rushes or sweats or jumps or feels anything, really, for about the last three weeks of the month. It’s that feeling cued up quite perfectly by Jessica Lea Mayfield’s disinterested bargain in “Kiss Me Again,” the same one that accompanies the fade towards the end of a relationship: “You got me where you want me, but I ain’t all there.” And again, later: “You can touch me if you want to, I don’t really care.” Read More »
