Wilco's album survives troubled birth

By STEPHEN DOWLING

It's been a strange year for Jeff Tweedy. The frontman of the critically acclaimed American alt-country rock band has delivered possibly his most accomplished album, yet had it refused by his record company.

He's lost half his band in the blink of an eye, toured an album that didn't exist, found the sentiments behind it resonate a few months after it was finished.

Wilco's new album is not a predictable amble down a vaguely country-rock avenue. It's like a Ray Bradbury short story or a strange, fantastical film you watch half-awake, the imagery jumbled and strange.

Tweedy toiled on the art-pop opus that swerved mightily from anything he'd done before, filled with elliptical lyrics that have taken on a different life post-September 11. Yet, if record label Reprise had had its way, none of this would have come to light.

Half of Wilco, it seems, would have been quite happy with that situation themselves.

Guitarist Jay Bennet and drummer Ken Coomer left the band, the former acrimoniously, and Tweedy found himself with only bass player John Stirratt for company. When Reprise heard the finished album, they recoiled. The pink slips were not long in coming.

Oddly enough, the quiet, sour-smiling Tweedy would like to thank them, polishing off the last traces of an omelette in a London hotel.

"There were a few people in power that I'm only indebted they didn't put it out and squash it," he says.

"That's basically it - we handed in a record and they showed us the door. The only funny thing is that we thought we'd handed in a Herman's Hermits record and they thought we'd handed in Metal Machine Music," he says in a reference to Lou Reed's famously unlistenable album.

Ironically, Wilco has signed to the more avant garde label Nonesuch, another Time Warner label, meaning that Warners paid for the albums not once but twice.

It left Tweedy in a difficult situation - though Wilco had been critically lauded from the word go (their masterpiece 1996 double album Being There found its way into most best-of-the-90s polls) their commercial success was less stratospheric. So Tweedy bought the tapes from Warners ("it didn't cost me too much") and posted the record on the band's website. Putting together a new band with guitarist Leroy Bach and drummer Glenn Kotche, they took to the road, playing a record that couldn't be bought at the shops, and relied instead on the power of the internet. "More people knew the songs than knew them on Summer Teeth when we first toured that record. It's like the record had been out for a year."

Another of the reasons Yankee Hotel Foxtrot doesn't resemble its predecessors is the involvement of avant garde Chicago producer-musician and now Sonic Youth's fifth member, Jim O'Rourke, in its recording.

Its opener, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, creaks and groans like something from the Beatles' White Album picked up on a hissing wireless.

"It's a very simple song," he says. "It's testing the strength of three chords and a melody for eight minutes, and testing meaning by singing nonsense, thinking that was a very direct thing to say but does it really mean that or whether I break your heart is up to you. Via Chicago [off Summer Teeth] is the same, three chords taken through as much destruction as possible.

"It ended up being Jim's words and changes that were almost like scene changes, trying to take that very narrow thread and imply it's there most of the time, like a thread through a necklace, you know it's there 'cos the beads are still hanging round your neck."

The haunting thing about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, though, is the way that many of its images seem to slot into the jumbled imagery of September 11 and its aftermath. War On A War is a looped empty threat to an unknown enemy while Jesus Etc is a beautiful ballad full of apocalyptic lines like "skyscrapers are scraping together", the juxtaposition between the tender keyboards and Tweedy's wracked voice all the more desolate. There's even a song that bitterly salutes "the ashes of American flags", though not in the context of international hatred or fallen comrades.

"Specifically I was inspired by concentrating through images," he says, aware of the inflammatory logic of a stars and stripes going up in flames.

"Why if the flag is so beautiful and symbolic, why are not the ashes of it as powerful? Isn't the person who creates the ashes and burns the flag, by that logic, aren't they more patriotic because they see through the symbol?

"The people that burned flags in the 60s on campuses during the Vietnam War were morally conscious and in a way were closer in spirit to what we like to believe America to be, or any culture that professes to protect freedom and liberty."

Tweedy has had to field a lot of questions about what it's like to be an American now, maybe because of his association with Woody Guthrie (Wilco have recorded two albums of Guthrie lyrics with Billy Bragg). He's not offering any solutions - he's not even certain he's even asked the question properly.

He's unsure why Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's songs have taken on this extra weight, but he's glad that they've survived the process.

"Some of it was that and it was coincidental - like when you get your heart broken and every song on the radio is about them. That's what art does, that's its function.

"If anything I can feel grateful that the intent is intact, that it was sturdy enough to feel like singing them still, and that they didn't collapse under the weight of the real world."

* Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is out now.