Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on the inspiration behind new album Cruel Country
IT seems as if Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy has finally gone back to his roots.
You need to know that his first significant foray into recorded music was with Uncle Tupelo, who achieved cult status in the late Eighties and early Nineties as pioneers of the “alt-country” movement.
But since forming Wilco in Chicago 28 years ago, Tweedy has pushed one of America’s most captivating bands to bold new sonic horizons.
A restless soul surrounded by talented musicians employing a wide range of instruments and effects, Tweedy taps into his nation’s psyche with laser-guided precision . . . without falling into the genre trap. Until now.
The new Wilco long player, a 21-track double, is, shock horror, described by the man himself as a country album.
Called Cruel Country, it’s not straight-up, old school like Johnny Cash in his prime but it does have an acoustic, pared back, folky feel with tasteful flourishes of lap steel guitar.
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It’s still very much a Wilco album, informed by Tweedy’s unease about the state of the Union in 2022 and full of very human emotion.
Speaking from his home in the Windy City where he runs The Loft studio, 54-year-old Tweedy says: “A genre like country is an agreed-upon fiction and, in a weird way, a band is an agreed-upon fiction.
“So I think it’s pretty exciting to enforce that limitation and see how we fit in.”
As it turned out, Tweedy and his cohort of Nels Cline (guitar), Pat Sansone (various instruments), Glenn Kotche (percussion), John Stirratt (bass) and Mikail Jorgensen (keyboards) had “a great and liberating time”.
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He continues: “We weren’t aiming right at country music. We weren’t trying recreate something like the Bakersfield sound (Buck Owens, Merle Haggard), but country has been part of our vocabulary for nearly 30 years.”
That along with rock, art-pop, gospel, electronica, jazz, ambient noise and, on one particular ten-minute track called Spiders (Kidsmoke), Krautrock.
Tweedy casts his mind back to his Uncle Tupelo days, to the band he formed with Jay Farrar and Mike Heidorn in Belleville, what he calls a “semi-rural” part of Illinois.
Their debut album, No Depression, took its name from their rootsy cover of a song by country pioneers The Carter Family, who were all the rage in the Thirties and Forties.
But the record also bore seriously loud post-punk guitar rock in the shape of Graveyard Shift and Whiskey Bottle.
“We were trying to make a connection . . . folk music is punk rock and punk rock is folk music,” says Tweedy.
By folk, he also means country because, in America, the lines are blurred into one great tradition.
Tweedy says: “Growing up in the US and certainly if you’re from a rural area, it’s pretty hard to avoid country music.
“It wasn’t exactly what my friends and neighbours were listening to but it was on TV all the time in shows like Hee Haw (songs and humour set in the fictional Kornfield Kounty).
“Back then, you’d turn the radio dial looking for something to listen to and you’d end up on a country station.”
He continues: “When we were putting Uncle Tupelo together, I realised that Hank Williams was a way more terrifying character than (hardcore Black Flag punk) Henry Rollins.
“And we were just a bunch of dumb kids fortunate to have come across some good music and were open-minded enough to listen to it.”
By the time Uncle Tupelo disbanded in 1994 and Tweedy had founded Wilco, the term alt-country had come in to fashion.
But he says: “As far as I’m concerned, alt-country has been a part of rock and roll since the beginning.
“The Beatles had country songs and the Stones certainly did. By the time we came along, it was a well-established fact.”
For Tweedy, the role of The Byrds gets overlooked among the adulation for Gram Parsons, who joined them on the seminal Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album, and later died aged 26 in The Joshua Tree National Park from drugs and drink.
“Gram had that beautiful corpse which people obsess about,” he says.
“Dying young created a mythology around his contribution but The Byrds mean so much more to me overall.”
Another of Tweedy’s abiding inspirations is the aforementioned Carter Family who made down-home traditional music wildly popular.
“They were pretty miraculous,” he says. “What an incredible service. A P Carter collected all those songs . . . even if he shouldn’t have put his name on them!
“And what about Mother Maybelle Carter’s guitar playing . . . how did she come up with that?
Well, she said she just played what she wanted to hear so she invented a style.”
With all these thoughts and influences bubbling around in Tweedy’s head, now perhaps you’ll understand why Wilco’s new album is not such a surprise.
Before the Covid pandemic kicked, they had begun work on a very different type of record, as he explains.
“It was more along the lines of Summerteeth (1999) or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) but when we got together, we immediately started gravitating towards these (Cruel Country) songs.
The “country” constraints imposed put Tweedy squarely in a comfort zone he didn’t know existed.
“The songs seemed to come out of me unimpeded,” he says. “Before we knew it, we had a whole record done.”
Within the set framework, Tweedy was able to articulate his feelings about America and “confusion consuming” his fellow countrymen.
He doesn’t specifically deal with the Trump era, the Mexican border wall, climate change, the George Floyd murder, mass shootings, the Covid lockdowns, abortion rights, erosion of democracy, social media nastiness, but all these things infuse the atmosphere of his songs.
“For those who had an idea where things were heading, it’s been a disorienting time,” decides Tweedy.
“So casting all that against the solid architecture of a country or folk song makes things more understandable.”
On Cruel Country’s title track, he croons: “I love my country stupid and cruel . . . red, white and blue.”
Tweedy explains the duality in that sentiment: “I feel bitterly angry at a lot of my fellow Americans and the things I see.
“But you just can’t completely cut yourself off from other emotions, the love and the feeling of connection. We all need each other, whether we’re at our best or at our worst. Right now, everybody’s mad at the wrong people.”
On the song Hints, he addresses America’s polarity when he sings: “There is no middle when the other side would rather kill than compromise.”
He says: “I grew up in a very racist environment. It wasn’t being discussed in our household but it was pervasive.”
Ultimately, however, Tweedy believes “we’re all in the same boat and that actually gives me some hope”.
Story To Tell reinforces his optimism with this line: “The world is always on the brink but hearts are stronger than you think.”
He maintains that hope for the world inherited by his two musician sons, Spencer and Sammy, who joined him on 200 episodes of the streamed Tweedy Show during the pandemic.
'GIVES ME SOME HOPE'
“They are so smart and thoughtful and they’re friends,” he says.
“Unlike me, they’re city kids so they have a level of awareness.”
Spencer, he reveals, has been “staying really busy” working with the budding Chicago star Liam Kazar and folk singer Joan Shelley, among others.
“And Sammy’s been honing his more electronic music. He’s also been singing in the band pretty much all the time. He’s the younger, skinnier me.”
If Wilco went through the uncertainty of line-up changes during their early years, the past 18 years have been marked out by stability.
Tweedy accepts it is his responsibility to keep things on track. “I work at that and I want every member to be invested in the band,” he affirms.
“They’ve helped build it . . . and it’s not such a bad way to live!”
This brings us to the 20th anniversary of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which Wilco have been performing live in its entirety. (A box set loaded with extras is due soon.)
Despite its status as a ground-breaking classic from “America’s Radiohead”, the album was produced in some trying circumstances — band disagreements, label issues and Tweedy’s terrible migraines which lead to pain-killer dependency.
'I WAS BLINDSIDED'
Perhaps because of all the baggage around YHF, he has found the recent gigs more stressful than he imagined.
“I was blindsided by the songs being performed in that order, all together,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting the emotional impact.
“We’ve never stopped playing any of the songs in all the years since.
“But they’re cast in a totally different atmosphere, being surrounded with stuff that came afterwards, and just that knowledge alone creates a life raft. I’m thinking, ‘Here’s a song from last year. I made it, I’m still here’.”
Tweedy says the shows induced “a vague, oppressive weight but, at the same time, felt rewarding and cathartic.
“Every night, I was crying by the end of (final track) Reservations. Everybody would be standing there really quiet which was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced in a theatre.
“That slight delay before people started applauding felt triumphant.”
Talking to Tweedy, band leader, solo artist, author, you sense a man consumed by music with time for little else . . . but he sets me straight.
"I don’t feel as if I work overly hard,” he says. “For me, writing is switching off. That’s partly how I’ve coped with stress and internal discomfort. It’s also a way to connect with myself.”
He also tells of his other great pleasure in life. “I walk in the woods,” he says. “I do a lot of hiking!”
Tweedy and wife Sue Miller own a rural retreat “on the other side of Lake Michigan”.
“It’s a pretty weird place because its woodland with sand dunes which you don’t expect to see together. When I’m on tour, I tend to spend as much time outside as I can.
“I usually get a ride to some green area but, if that’s not available, I’ll just look on a map and head towards the nearest park.
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“Even a good, brisk walk in the city is pretty efficient at untangling your knots.”
Nothing like leaving your Yankee Hotel for a Foxtrot in the Cruel Country!