Wilco's Tweedy: The Hardest Working Man In Show Business?

03/09/1999 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

With today's release of Wilco's third album, Summer Teeth, singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy may give James Brown a run for the title "The Hardest Working Man In Show Business."

In 1998, Wilco collaborated with Billy Bragg on Mermaid Avenue, an album that breathed new life to a raft of previously unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics. Also last year, Tweedy played a prominent role in the critically acclaimed Golden Smog album, Weird Tales. He also found time to write and record Summer Teeth.

The latest Wilco effort, which shows the band expanding its sound with some multi-layered experiments, was recorded over a two-year period in between Wilco tours and Tweedy's extracurricular activities. In spite of the other projects, Summer Teeth had its own direction early on, according to Tweedy. "We were pretty much on our path of making this record when we stopped and made Mermaid Avenue," he told LAUNCH over lunch at Warner Bros. Records. "We were already halfway done with it, and we had already made some of the defining elements of this record apparent to us. We had to stop, and it was good, like a breather. I don't mean to sound so cavalier about something that's in such a historical context, but it was just like a vacation."

Summer Teeth takes the experimentation the band first revealed on the 1997 two-CD set Being There a step further, leaving the band's association with the alternative country scene Tweedy helped establish with Uncle Tupelo in the dust. "We started with the kind of Being There-type takes on everything," said Tweedy. "[They were] sort of emotionally and musically stark versions of the songs; but not only do we feel like we'd done that a fair amount, but as a band we've been leaning towards experimentation and pop music, and those are the things that excite us in the studio. Also, in using the studio as another element, you're kind of leaning that way in general, making a record. I think over time, it made sense to us. The emotion of the lyrics and the emotions of the songs created the ambition to make some kind of world bigger and more beautiful, and [we were] driven by that dichotomy--wanting it to be that way, and wanting it not to sound so 'desperate' and hopeless [but] more realistic."

Features on Wilco and Billy Bragg are available now on LAUNCH.com; a brand-new Wilco feature will be up this Friday.

-- Matthew Greenwald, Los Angeles

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