Wilco (The Review)
I know everyone and their mother is going to be writing up a review of the new Wilco album (which doesn’t come out for another month, but which you can listen to on their website), but I thought I’d offer my two cents anyway.
Recently, I ran across this quote while reading a blog:
There is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. The artist is saying: display and bravura are tricks for the young, and yes, showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.
- Author Julian Barnes
I read it in a blog about software development, but I think it applies pretty perfectly to Jeff Tweedy’s songwriting at this point in his life (not that I really consider him old). While it may not be as flashy or psychedelic as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or as unsettling as A Ghost is Born, there is definitely a maturity, a frankness to his songs now which he displays front and center where in the past he tended to couch his ideas in deceptively complex instrumentation and production.
Listening to this new album, as well as it’s predecessor Sky Blue Sky, feels like having a conversation with Jeff Tweedy. When the album is over, you feel like you know the man. And that’s something that I don’t know I could really say about any other songwriter.
