Americana Turns To Pop

03/12/1999 4:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Michael Gelfand

There's a big difference between doing what's expected of you, not knowing what to do, and doing what you want--just ask Wilco's Jeff Tweedy. Shortly after his seminal "No Depression" group Uncle Tupelo split up, Tweedy and his fellow Tupelos (minus songwriting partner and Son Volt leader Jay Farrar) formed Wilco and quickly released A.M. (Reprise) in 1995. The band's hotly awaited debut attempted to strike out on a new musical path, but Wilco seemed unable to veer away from the Americana groove set forth by Uncle Tupelo, and the resulting stylistic irresolution left fans wondering which way the new band would choose to turn.

A year later, Wilco released Being There (Reprise), a stunning double-album that's as confusing for its stylistic explorations as A.M. is for its retread focus. Being There found the band traveling all over the map, mining Americana, garage rock and pure pop with equal aplomb, and while the experiment was successful (in that it delivered something for everyone), Wilco's desire to be all things to all people left them without a signature sound.

Cut to Summer Teeth (Reprise), Wilco's most focused and definitive record yet. Combining Americana's sparse conviction with Being There's eclectic flourishes, Summer Teeth is a refined collection of 15 songs that realizes the upside potential of the previous efforts by combining Tweedy's undeniable songwriting ability with the heretofore unknown songwriting talents of his bandmates--for the first time, all the songs are credited to the entire band. Summer Teeth finds Tweedy's gravelly voice, spirited melodies, and often pained human perspective perfectly underscored by the feel-oriented rhythm section of bassist John Stiratt and drummer Ken Coomer, and by the pop panache of Jay Bennett's layered keyboards and understated guitar work. While the album's blatant pop hooks and snappy tempos may not make it the record that old fans expected or even wanted, it's clearly the record that Wilco wanted to make--and it's their strongest, too.

LAUNCH:
Were you, personally or as a band, frustrated by where Being There led you, in terms of what other people thought Wilco was supposed to become? Is that why you went with more of a pop focus on Summer Teeth?

TWEEDY:
No, I think Being There was more of a reaction to being bored with where we were. It was maybe more of a conscious attempt than this record to stretch out or expand our horizons. This record was more like, "Well, we got that out of the way, what do we really feel like doing now?"--more an effort to hone in on some thought, with the relaxed knowledge that the next time we get to do something else. [We're] not really defining the band by anything else other than the moment. We don't have an agenda that says three records down the road we have to make a pop record.

LAUNCH:
Did working on someone else's music [with Billy Bragg on the Grammy-nominated, Woody Guthrie-derived Mermaid Avenue (Elektra)] affect the writing and recording of this record?

TWEEDY:
In a weird way, it made it that much easier to focus on what we initially set out to focus on, because Mermaid Avenue was recorded pretty much directly in the middle of the whole process of this record. It was great, and it also indulged a side of us that we weren't approaching at all with the material we picked for this record: the folk stuff, or this country-rock kind of thing that comes naturally to us and is something we enjoy doing. We did it really fast. The songs that I wrote and that Jay and I wrote were recorded in four days, and the month and a half in Dublin was spent recording the other songs with Billy. That was actually the work side of it. It was a practical recording environment, where we had to be hired hands and make it work.

LAUNCH:
That must have been a relief in that it wasn't "The Wilco Show."

TWEEDY:
It was frustrating, actually. It was a relief in some sense, but I was very into it and internalized the project a lot in a short time. Billy had been working on it a lot longer and was asked initially by Nora [Guthrie, Woody's daughter], and then we were brought in. He had a vision for it for a long time, and what was frustrating in the end--and I do think it ended up being a nice hybrid of where we were, not our songs versus his songs, but the overall picture of the record--but in the middle of it we felt that there was a place that it could've been taken to that we started envisioning. Billy saw that and let a certain amount of it into his original vision, but then there was also a part of it that he wouldn't let go of, which, like I said, in hindsight probably made the better record. But it was frustrating because we're used to going really instinctively toward the end of a record. And then there's the intangibles, from vibe to even something as subjective as what mix is better. In the end, that was this thing that nobody else in the world would give a sh-t about, but it was difficult to let go of.

LAUNCH:
People will probably speculate that there's some meaning to the title Summer Teeth. Is it some cryptic reflection on pop, or maybe a literal reference to your son Spencer's teeth coming in?

TWEEDY:
No, it's a joke that we used a lot when we were on the road, because during the course of touring behind Being There, everybody in the band had dental surgery. Jay went to six different dentists around the world to have root canals done while we were traveling. I had a couple of molars crack off, and our tour manager had tons of dental surgery, and we were all losing our teeth. So the joke is: "I've got summer teeth. Some are teeth, some aren't." For some reason we just started calling the record Summer Teeth, and a lot of people hate it because they think it's a goofball title, but I think it stuck because the record reflects that joke--some of it is really serious and some of it isn't serious at all but is in a really serious context. Some of it is really dark but is put in a really bright, bubbly pop context. It's all kind of elusive. Some things are real, some things aren't. I've lost the ability to distinguish or judge, and that's what Summer Teeth means to me. I don't know if anybody else will get that, but I don't really care, you know?

LAUNCH:
On this record, the band shamelessly mixes its influences into the songs. There's no attempt on your part to veil your love of Brian Wilson harmonies, Beatles middle-eights or the odd Grateful Dead groove....

TWEEDY:
I don't listen to it like that. I always try to listen to it and ask myself whether I've heard anything exactly like it, and I haven't. I think the best you can hope for is to learn how to speak honestly with these dialects or whatever you've learned from listening to records your whole life. Use them as flashcards or semaphore for part of how you feel. I just don't think there's any way I can say it better than this, you know? I feel like it would be more self-conscious to deny it, to deny all those elements. I'd really have to struggle to come up with stuff--a kazoo, cheesy strings, maybe a talking African drum: "Okay, that's me. That's my voice."

LAUNCH:
Will you attempt to reproduce the lush pop sound of this record live?

TWEEDY:
I have no f--king idea [laughs]. I don't think we could really do it. We'd have to take 50 people on the road to reproduce this record. Or a lot of samples or triggers, which none of us have an idea how to use. Being There was a lot like that. As live as that record was, it was still a studio environment, and by the end of that tour, we'd figured out a way to play everything off that record. But a lot of that stuff was more flexible as to how it could be interpreted; on this record, there are songs that aren't going to work. We'll just have to get used to that and feel lucky that we have at least a backlog of material that we can put in there. But the idea is to try to do what we can to pick out the essential elements of each song and represent them.

LAUNCH:
If you were going to be in any band other than the band that you're in right now, which one would it be?

TWEEDY:
I first started listening to music when I was a little kid, so I've pictured myself in every band [laughs]. I couldn't enjoy listening to music unless I could picture myself doing it. Initially, it would have been the Clash. They had some sort of redemptive power. I always pictured myself being in the Clash and playing at my high school auditorium and just having all these people who hated me having to suffer through it, suffering through my glory.