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Roger, Wilco
A Talk with Jeff Tweedy About his Band's New Album
 Listen to John
Ydstie's interview with Jeff Tweedy.
Listen to Meredith Ochs' review of the new Uncle Tupelo anthology.
April 23, 2002 -- Uncle Tupelo is credited with being the first band to successfully lash together country and punk. The band named its debut album, 1990's No Depression, after a Carter Family song, which was adopted by a musical movement that owes as much to Black Flag as to Buck Owens.
The band's two main songwriters, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, split up in 1994. Each went on to pursue his own musical direction. Farrar founded Son Volt, where he has continued to examine, via traditional music, the dark, rural mythos -- what critic Greil Marcus called "that old, weird America."
Tweedy walked on the sunnier side of life -- writing hook-laden, well-crafted pop melodies for his band Wilco. John Ydstie talks with Tweedy about the band's new album for All Things Considered.
Wilco has been both lauded and chastised for moving further away from alt-country and more toward pop with each new album. The band's latest, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, certainly moves further from alt-country. Whether it moves more toward pop is an open question. Their label, Reprise, refused to release the album, so Wilco took it over to Nonesuch. Tweedy says Reprise "reacted like it was Metal Machine Music (Lou Reed's 1975 hour-long noise assault), and we felt we had handed them a Herman's Hermits record."
Neither description quite fits. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is Wilco's most experimental and least hooky album to date, but it's far from being avant-garde. Beneath the layers of keyboards and engineered soundscapes, Wilco's signature sound remains intact. (In this respect, the album is much like Farrar's latest effort, Sebastapol, which is also a sonic departure.)
The Wilco album's title, a bit of shortwave radio babble heard on the record, continues a radio theme for the band that started with its name and the name of its first album (A.M.). Tweedy says he's been listening to so-called shortwave numbers stations (mysterious stations where sets of numbers are read over and over, perhaps for spies), and he says that while he was writing the album, he was influenced by what Ydstie describes as "the pulsing sound of shortwave radio."
"I like it the way I like Steven Reich's stuff," Tweedy says. "It's minimalist."
Additional Resources
 Episode 14 of All Songs Considered features a cut from the new Wilco album and Uncle Tupelo's rendition of "No Depression."
An NPR review by Meredith Ochs of Jay Farrar's solo album, Sebastapol.
An NPR review by Tom Moon of the 1999 Wilco album, Summerteeth.
As part of the Lost and Found Sound series, All Things Considered in May of 2000 looked into the mystery of shortwave "number stations."
Who is Steve Reich?
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