Wilco frontman Tweedy gets intimate with new album

By Jonathan Cohen

CHICAGO (Billboard) - The Wilco loft takes up a full floor of a nondescript building in Chicago's Irving Park. This expansive place could use a paint job and some new rugs, but it's cozy in a way that makes you feel like you're in a grown-up's clubhouse.

Several sets of bunk beds double as office space underneath, while large road cases on wheels and shelves full of gear occupy their own corner of the site.

Loud, unexplained banging noises come from the floor above, while the band's road manager excitedly divulges that an employee at the local Jewel grocery store has just set aside multiple cases of the lime soda Wilco's members like to drink at the loft. Meanwhile, frontman Jeff Tweedy gets comfortable on a couch surrounded by old Wilco concert posters.

Tweedy has slept on the futon here when he's been too immersed in band work to drive home to his wife and two preteen kids. He recorded an album with his side project Loose Fur here in late 2005, and he liked the experience so much that he decided to track the next Wilco record -- "Sky Blue Sky," due May 15 via Nonesuch -- here, too, even though it required the band's six members to squeeze into a cramped alcove no more than 30 feet wide.

It may sound like forced intimacy, but it's in this environment that Tweedy feels most comfortable right now. And it's this close-knit vibe that permeates the beautiful, soulful "Sky Blue Sky," the follow-up to 2004's "A Ghost Is Born." Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and the newest members, guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, worked on one song at a time, crafting arrangements together in a way Wilco has never done before.

INTERNAL HARMONY

"Somehow it has organized itself into a one-mind kind of thing," Tweedy says of Wilco's modus operandi in the studio. "We sit in a circle over there without headphones for up to six hours at a time, just working on one part. For six guys to stay focused on something like that is pretty remarkable. This is the first time in my life I've ever been part of a band that can really mine something that deep and have that kind of stamina and attention."

The band's newfound internal harmony is a far cry from the near-implosion that occurred during the making of 2002's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." That troubled period is chronicled in the 2003 documentary "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," which showed how at odds Tweedy had grown with multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett (Tweedy hired Jim O'Rourke to remix the album, despite strong protests from Bennett).

In a devastating one-two punch to the band's stability, Bennett was booted from Wilco once "Yankee" was finished, and the album itself was unceremoniously rejected by Reprise, which then severed ties with the band.

On top of everything else, Tweedy conquered an addiction to painkillers that forced a brief postponement in the release of "A Ghost Is Born" as well as tour dates in support of that album.

To be sure, Wilco's current lineup has Tweedy feeling more confident in his abilities than ever. "We've gotten better at writing as a group," says Kotche, who joined during the early stages of "Yankee." "A lot of these ideas still come in as seeds from Jeff; a chord progression or riffs. But working together in this way, it's due to where Jeff's at now, compared to when we were writing 'Ghost.' He's in a different place mentally. He's a lot more confident and able to trust us around him. He can take a lot of suggestions and ideas and have the confidence to know they're a good or a bad idea."

STARTLING SIMPLICITY

"Yankee" and "Ghost" offered significantly more experimental music than Wilco's prior albums, which were rooted in the tried-and-true song forms of the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. Yet they brought the band to a new level of commercial and critical acclaim. "Yankee" has sold 590,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, while "Ghost" debuted at a career-best No. 8 on The Billboard 200 and has shifted 348,000 to date.

In contrast to its postproduction-enhanced predecessors, "Sky Blue Sky" is startling in its simplicity: an album recorded straight to tape with hardly any overdubs, and Tweedy singing live in the same room with the musicians. The singer estimates at least half the songs feature vocals captured on the first take.

The inscrutable turns of phrase (i.e. "I am an American aquarium drinker") that marked the last two albums have been largely dispensed with. Instead, Tweedy's narrators clearly struggle to be heard, to be loved and to be worthy of love on poignant songs like "Leave Me (Like You Found Me)," the drumless "Please Be Patient With Me," "Either Way" and the goose- bump-inducing closer, "On and On and On," which Tweedy wrote for his dad after his mother passed away.