There aren’t many examples of Wilco’s experimental bent on their first album, A.M., recorded at Memphis’ Easley-McCain Studios in the summer of 1994, though their particular brand of country rock was arguably an innovation itself, laced with touches of power pop — partly thanks to The Bottle Rockets’ Brian Henneman guesting on lead guitar — and spacier sonic landscapes, like the semi-calamitous breakdown and feedback outro of “Blue Eyed Soul.” Such sporadic flourishes set Wilco apart from contemporaries like The Jayhawks, though paled before other bands’ sonic innovations going on (e.g., the Grifters) at the same studio, known for its “pro gonzo” approach.
Even then, Jeff Tweedy, the band’s singer-songwriter, had freakier sounds in mind. As he told Marc Maron in a 2018 interview for Maron’s WTF podcast, “my older brother had a collection of records that was really advanced.” When Tweedy was around 10 years old, he devoured his brother’s “space rock records like Hawkwind and Amon Düül and Kraftwerk and Aphrodite’s Child and all this really mind-expanding stuff.” While many construe Wilco as a band starting with purely country-folk-rock origins, the synth- and feedback-laden sounds the band later embraced are the real sound of Tweedy getting back to his roots.
His spirit of adventure has in turn been wholeheartedly embraced by the eventual lineup of the band that stuck, lending their celebrated live shows a spark of spontaneity. That will surely be the case when they appear under the stars at Grind City Amp on Tuesday, July 7th, drawing on their three-decade catalog over two full sets (with no opening act).
Beyond that, the drive to experiment with sound has made each successive Wilco album a little exercise in world-building. For the group’s Grammy-winning fifth album, A Ghost Is Born (recently re-released by Nonesuch as a comprehensive box set, with vivid liner notes by Bob Mehr), Tweedy leaned into this, taking on more lead guitar work and giving greater rein to his adventurous side. And thus was born not only a ghost, but a new version of Wilco — after the album was done.
That’s where Nels Cline comes in, and the exploratory music he’d already made under his own name, as the Nels Cline Singers, or in various collaborations, reveals just how open to sonic adventure Tweedy had become. In fact, Tweedy’s playing on Ghost had already gotten Cline’s attention. “That’s when Jeff really came to the fore, with tracks like ‘Spiders (Kidsmoke),’ on the guitar. So when he asked me to consider joining the band, I said, ‘You’re doing all this cool guitar stuff now, what do you want me to do?’ And all he said was, ‘We’ll figure it out.’ Then Patrick Sansone and I joined, and we ended up touring for A Ghost Is Born, and playing all the other stuff, and now it’s 22 years — the same six guys.”
Cline was perhaps an unforeseen choice at the time, but he slotted into the role with considerable aplomb for someone who’d already, as a bandleader, released nine albums blending musique concrète and free sonic jams with meticulously composed jazz outings using stop-start leaps of rhythm and harmony. Even as he continues to get his non-pop music ya-yas out via ongoing solo and collaborative releases (like the series of trio albums he and pianistic experimentalist Thollem created with guests like William Parker, Michael Wimberly, Pauline Oliveros, and Terry Riley), he remains an indispensable part of the Wilco sound.
“I wasn’t looking to join a prominent rock band, that wasn’t on my agenda,” Cline recalls. “I’d had a couple of touring offers, like journeyman kind of guitar work, that I had turned down. But in the case of Wilco, I knew it was going to be about unpredictability, flexibility, versatility, and, you know, no formula. And that was very, very attractive.”
Album artwork: Azuma Makoto
All those qualities neatly sum up the vibe of what is now a Wilco tradition since 2010, the Solid Sound Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which blends the band’s folksier tendencies (Billy Bragg is attending the current iteration as of this writing, reviving the 1998 Mermaid Avenue material he recorded with Wilco) with music that’s a bit more adventurous (as when the Memphis-based Mellotron Variations played there in 2019, or when Cline’s own Consentrik Quartet plays the festival this year).
All experimentalism aside, Cline, like Wilco bandmates John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Mikael Jorgensen, and Sansone, always plays to the song, and the band’s decidedly non-formulaic arrangements may be the ultimate expression of their chemistry. That’s abundantly clear in their 2023 album Cousin, which, under the helm of producer Cate Le Bon, takes the band in a newly ethereal direction. As Cline says, “the chorus pedals started coming out!”
Whatever the era or album they’re drawing on, Wilco embraces the tension between freedom and form. “There’s certainly a lot of give and take in terms of how we spontaneously arrange music and how we carefully arrange the music,” Cline adds. “It’s 99.9 percent Jeff Tweedy’s music, and it just seems to work. It’s very structured in some areas, and less structured in others. The set list does change slightly, sometimes dramatically, but I basically have parts that I play, and the wildest we get is usually playing ‘Spiders (Kidsmoke),’ that’s when Jeff really goes for it. It’s a droner with a groove, so it’s not totally free, but it’s really fun just to take it where it goes.”
