Wilco

“WE basically started around the same time, right?” says Jeff Tweedy, musing on the shared history between Uncut and Wilco. “I remember buying Uncut when we would tour Europe, it was easier to get them there then. It was pretty exciting to see a magazine that in-depth about music on a newsstand at the airport. But we get it here at The Loft now – I probably haven’t missed many issues over the years.”

With five Wilco releases included in the 300 greatest albums of Uncut’s lifetime – the most of any artist – it seems a fine time to run through all of the band’s work with their restless leader, from 1995’s AM to 2019’s Ode To Joy. Tweedy even drops some hints about the band’s next opus along the way.

“When things sound confident, I get nervous,” he explains of one thread running through his life’s pursuit, “because it doesn’t work for me emotionally when things are super-confident. I still crave a brokenness to whatever it is we’re doing. And a lot of the time, it’s me providing that – my voice is a fairly broken vessel for whatever I’m singing.

“You know, all rock music is stupid. But to me it has the potential to be sublime in ways that almost nothing else does.”

AM

SIRE/REPRISE, 1995

Tweedy and the remains of Uncle Tupelo rush out their power-pop debut

The ultimate dream for me was to be in a band that toured in a van and played shows and got to go around and see places – so I’ve outlived my life goals by about 30 years! I didn’t want to take any time to sit around and think about what I wanted to do [], I just wanted to do it, to get back in the van with somebody and go play shows. We mapped out the songs we wanted to record within a few months of Uncle Tupelo’s last show – I probably was fearful that if the momentum stopped, I wouldn’t get to do this thing I love. All our records sound a little bit different to each holds up for me. There are a few songs that feel fairly half-baked, like they could have either stood to be B-sides or outtakes, but a lot of my favourite records have songs like that. I still enjoy hearing it, it doesn’t sound completely dated, because it doesn’t really sound like anything being made at that time. It wasn’t going for a grunge thing or a contemporary sound really. Luckily, there aren’t many records in the Wilco catalogue that have those markings of a specific period of recording, I don’t think, this one included. It sounds delightfully out of step.