Wilco
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Wilco

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“It’s something intangible that hits you between your heart and your groin,” says Wilco’s bass player John Stirratt. “That’s what makes a song for me. It’s not incredible words, not incredible music, it’s feeling in that part of your gut that’s right in between your hips or your groin and your heart, you know?”

When the co-founder of an American alt rock giant reveals to you the secret of a good song, you should probably take note – particularly when that band’s often experimental and crushingly romantic songs dispensed with conventions of genre to ensure its status as one of America’s pop greats. Along with frontman Jeff Tweedy, Stirratt is the longest standing member of Wilco, a band that’s toured almost ceaselessly in the past 20 years and somehow found time to release eight studio albums.

Their latest, 2011’s sprawling The Whole Love, has been touted as their least conceptually consistent in years, particularly since Wilco (The Album)’s concision and solid structure – and addition of a cameo with then-chart-hero Leslie Feist – appealed to the band’s mammoth fan base. The Whole Love’s more divergent moments, like the seven-minute opener and lush layers of 12-minute closing track One Sunday Morning, were bold but deliberate choices.

“I like how many feels and musical styles there are on it, in terms of spacey country and sort of more modern post rock,” explains Stirratt. “I like how it all came together in one record. I think that’s something we’ve tried to do, to create a more non-linear record over the last two records, especially. And I think it was a lot more successful than Wilco (The Album) in that regard. It’s hard to do that. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot really has a certain … it has a real linear sound. There’s obviously different-sounding tunes, but this one’s maybe more jarring from certain songs to certain songs.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was Wilco’s defiant, and defining, gesture. Already beginning to break from their earlier twang with Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s digressive noise sections – sandwiched between the usual lovesick country-tinged rock – led Warner imprint Reprise Records to reject the finished record.

“There was definitely this resentment towards someone not really liking the record we were really proud of,” says Stirratt. “But I think we were a little bit shielded from it by the management, and in my mind it was always going to be a forward step for all of us. There was kind of this idea early on that we were probably going to get the record and be able to go somewhere else with it. So, there wasn’t so much concern. It seemed like an exciting kind of thing for me. I’m sure I was shielded from the bad scenarios or the worse things that could’ve happened. … It always felt like we were really proud of the record, we knew what it was and we knew people would like it. It was just a question of where it would end up. So, c’est la vie, you know?

“I guess at the time we knew it was a pretty heavy record for us,” Stirratt continues. “But we didn’t feel like badarses. More than anything, we were sort of nonplussed or sort of hurt at the beginning. But I think when everybody heard about it being this victory for us in terms of us being able to sell it back to Warner Bros (imprint Nonesuch Records) – we didn’t mean for that, I mean, obviously we didn’t orchestrate that or anything – and we felt exposed more than anything. We didn’t have time to feel badarse.”

Since then, Wilco has set up their own label, dBPM, securing the band’s mastery over their own sound. But The Whole Love isn’t the first instance of Wilco exercising their artistic license. “I have to say, we’ve had artistic freedom for a long time,” says Stirratt. “Even people at Reprise would come by and hear a few things later in the process, but they were never involved in the studio. We’ve been lucky because we’ve never had to deal with it.”

Wilco is returning to Australia for Bluesfest, and sideshows at the appropriately grand Hamer Hall, in its post-2004 incarnation, which includes guitarist Nels Cline, Pat Sansone, Mikael Jorgensen and drummer Glenn Kotche in addition to Tweedy and Stirratt. “It’s definitely been the definitive live band, or live version of Wilco,” says Stirratt. “We’ve developed a rapport on and off stage, which has been something that’s really rare to find in a band.”

The shows will undoubtedly surprise fans with an unexpected (and sufficiently long) set. “Around 2000-2001 we had heard about our online presence – I don’t know how long I’d even had email at that point. People were into it, and they were trading the set lists from the shows, and they were sort of communicating with each other online and the thing sort of flowered between the band and the audience over the years. We really go out of our way not to play the nearly same show that we did the previous time. Especially now it’s so easy, it’s so accessible online to find out. We have the set list on record, so if we’re in Melbourne we’ll look and see what we did last time and stay away from that. I mean, there’s always the new record you’ve got to focus on, of course. But everything else, that’s the luxury of a big catalogue is to be able to work around it.”

BY DIJANA KUMURDIAN