These are songs that Wilco has covered, not the other way around. Nevertheless, I couldn’t not use this photo when I found it.
You may remember a few months ago when I posted 6 covers by and of Wilco. You may not. Either way, I recently stumbled onto some other excellent covers that Wilco has done, and felt I would be remiss (I’m pretty sure I’m using that correctly, right? I just remember my English teacher saying it a lot, and thought it worked well here) not to share them with you all. Watch ‘em, love ‘em, hate ‘em, vote for ‘em below:
*Note: some of these may be repeats from the previous ‘covers’ post, but that’s because they were too good to pass up. Tweedy doing Single Ladies? C’mon!
Wilco – Love And Mercy (Brian Wilson Cover)
Wilco - Any Major Dude Will Tell You (Steely Dan Cover)
Wilco - Color Me Impressed (The Replacements Cover)
Wilco – I Wanna Be Sedated (Ramones Cover)
Wilco - We Will Rock You (Queen Cover)
Wilco - Burned (Buffalo Springfield Cover)
Wilco – Broken Arrow (Another Buffalo Springfield Cover)
Wilco - Thirteen – (Big Star Cover)
Wilco – I’m Only Sleeping (Beatles Cover)
Jeff Tweedy – All The Single Ladies (um, Beyonce cover)
Jeff Tweedy - Fake Plastic Trees (Radiohead Cover)
Jeff Tweedy – Simple Twist of Fate (Bob Dylan Cover)
Wilco & Fleet Foxes – I Shall Be Released (The Band Cover)
The Tweedy/Tweedy and sons/Deerhoof collaboration 7" drops 10/11/11
A lot has been happening for Jeff Tweedy lately. Yesterday, he performed a solo show in Honolulu, Hawaii for his first ever performance in the state. Reviews for the performance look to have been generally (as expected) pretty great.
Tweedy showed why he’s always been considered to be a remarkably distinct singer and guitarist. The man knows how to hold his audience’s rapt attention. And Tweedy didn’t start off easy early on, with his second song being the long tale of “Remember the Mountain Bed,” originally from the “Mermaid Avenue” project Wilco did with English folksinger Billy Bragg. The captivating, imagistic lyrics of folk icon Woody Guthrie came alive, thanks the Tweedy melody that was wrapped around it. – HonoluluPulse.com
Spiders (Kidsmoke) Remember The Mountain Bed One Wing You And I I Am Trying to Break Your Heart Muzzle Of Bees Via Chicago Hummingbird Dawned On Me You Are Not Alone Someday, Some Morning, Sometime Not For The Season New Madrid So Much Wine [The Handsome Family] Jesus, etc. I’m Always In Love I’m The Man Who Loves You A Shot in the Arm
——————————- Born Alone (w/Pat Sansone on acoustic guitar and backing vocals) Open Your Mind (w/Pat Sansone on acoustic guitar and backing vocals) California Stars (w/Pat Sansone on acoustic guitar and backing vocals) Be Patient With Me (w/Pat Sansone on acoustic guitar and backing vocals) The Late Greats (w/Pat Sansone on acoustic guitar and backing vocals) Heavy Metal Drummer (w/Pat Sansone on acosutic guitar and backing vocals)
——————————- Walken (performed at edge of stage w/o PA system) – Chcek out the video below!
Jeff Tweedy – Walken Live at the Hawaii Theater
Jeff Tweedy – Banter + Hummingbird
Jeff Tweedy - Via Chicago
*Note – Apparently, Pat Sansone also opened for Tweedy in a rare solo acoustic performance. Here’s the setlist:
Silence Every Day Tell Me What You Want The Answer Don’t Forget Me Even Better [Mark Mulcahy] This Will Fall Away Tuesday Morning The Swallows Of London Town You And Your Sister [Chris Bell]
Here are a few videos from what looks and sounds to have been an excellent set:
Pat Sansone – Unknown Song (one of the songs listed above that’s not The Answer or Even Better)
Pat Sansone – The Answer
There is also some more big news from the world of Tweedy. In last month’s Tweedy FeedI mentioned Jeff’s collaboration with Deerhoof as well as his two sons in Deerhoof’s split 7″ series. Since then, many of us have been wondering exactly how such a collaboration would sound. Well we need wonder no more.
The Raccoonists – Own It
That’s Jeff Tweedy with his two sons, Spencer and Sam, in his latest side project “The Raccoonists.” It’s pretty crazy, the beginning almost like something out of Eraserhead, yet still very cool, and very rockin’. The A-side of the Deerhoof-Tweedy collaboration, Behold a Raccoon in the Darkness, features Tweedy singing over the instrumental part of Deerhoof’s “Behold a Marvel in the Darkness.” I have two words describe it: awesome.
Check out both sides of the single here, and pre-order it on pink clear vinyl here!
Looks like even our boy Jeff Tweedy is excited for September. What a rascal!
Man, even as September gets closer, it still feels far away. That sounded like something a very un-wise, very stoned philosopher might say. We’ve got less than two months until the release of The Whole Love and the sub-sequential tour, yet many of us Wilco fans are really in the mood for some new music. Even after listening to the latest single, “I Might”, on the radio, on our iPods, and on our way to court for pirating music, we still can’t get enough new Wilco.
Luckily, after snooping around a bit, I’ve found some more pretty great Wilco and Wilco-related tracks available for downloading and streaming. Consider this Round 2 of the free download post from July.
From Spin.com – Remember in Cline Time when I mentioned that Nels Cline of Wilco would be collaborating with a band called Tinariwen (“who are, I kid you not, a group of nomadic Tuareg tribesmen who fought in Mali’s civil war”) on an all-acoustic album called Tassili? Well, Spin has got the premiere track from the album, a track called “Imidiwan Ma Tennam” (Hey! That’s my mother’s name!), and it is, as expected, very awesome. According to Spin, “Tinariwen and Cline crafted the song separately on two different continents. The group worked up basic groove in Algeria, while Cline recorded his parts in Wilco’s Chicago Loft studio. Cline’s producer Ian Brennan says the guitarist’s concept was to “be like a UFO landing in the desert.” Curious as to how that sounds? Dig it here.
From nyctaper.com – This is a lossless download for the entire 6/25/07 Wilco performance at the Hammerstein in New York.
This is a download of The Autumn Defense (side project of John Stirratt and Pat Sansone of Wilco)’s “Back of My Mind.” It’s fantastic, and if you haven’t listened to their cover of “Paradise” (originally by Mark Mulcahy) on the Ciao My Shining Star album (the entire album is incredible), get to it. Spotify it, if you have the means.
FromIndieshuffle.com - This is something you may have heard before: it’s Jeff Tweedy’s acoustic rendition of “Yesterday” by a small, little-known band called The Beatles, in honor of Sir Paul McCartney’s recent gig at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
From OwlandBear.com – Woah. This is the mother-lode. This is a live Wilco archive (compiled by the very cool members of Via Chicago) of almost every live show ever recorded from Wilco, members of Wilco, and other incarnations of the band. From The Autumn Defense to Golden Smog to Seven Worlds Collide, there are enough free downloads here to make you want to strand yourself on a desert island just to listen to all of them.
OwlandBear.com say something on the Wilco Archive page that I think is important to keep in mind when we download stuff for free:
… don’t forget to buy any Wilco-related recordings and merchandise that you can get your hands on; these are great people with big hearts who love to give, so please don’t just take from them.
I believe that many of us do realize this, and that’s why we do things like preorder albums and glow-in-the-dark yo-yos, travel 200 miles to see a show that’s not even in the state we live in, and make our own music videos. We fans that truly appreciate the band and the work it does do not want to see great music thrown into a pile with Ke$ha and Justin Bieber CD’s in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart. We download and listen to these tracks not simply because they’re free, but because we love and enjoy the band’s art so much that we simply can’t get enough of it.
This is not meant to be a guilt trip in any way, just a little ramble on the current issues of music downloading legality.
Jeff Tweedy just saw what you were thinking...and he liked it.
If you type in “Wilco” on your favorite search engine, you’re going to find a lot of information: Tour dates, information on their new album The Whole Love, information on Solid Sound Fest, downloads and….wait. You can find all of that right here! What you can’t find, however, are the weird, interesting Wilco-themed things around the internet that only a dude with unlimited time on his hands could find. Well, now you’re in luck! I killed that guy, assumed his identity and stole his links. Here is a bunch of (as Dana Carvey as Johnny Carson would put it) Weird Wild Schtuff from around the internet, related to Wilco. Some are strange, some are confusing, some will shake you to the very core of your being. Others will make you say “meh.” Anyway, without further rambling, here is some Weird Wilco Schtuff.
First up is something some of you may have already seen, and others of you may have already tried:
I can't decide if this is ominous or homage-y
Yep. That’s exactly what it looks like: Wilco beer. Though Lagunitas, the brewing company, claims that Tweedy, Cline and the gang wasn’t the inspiration for Wilco Tango Foxtrot, I think I speak for all Wilco fans when I say (the sarcasm flowing heavily), “Yeah, OK.”
Reviews for the ale have been surprisingly positive (B+ from Beer Advocate, the only magazine I’d trust to review my hops and barley), especially from a few Wilco NewsTwitter followers:
“Very, very good. Had a few pints on tap and the bottle as well” -@TheManOfSeal
“It’s very good! I picked up a bottle this past weekend.” -@alexhansonman
So if “Wilco Tango Foxtrot Ale” is not a reference to Wilco or their now-classic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, what would be? “Beering There”? “Wilco (the ale)”? “What Light (beer)?”
If anyone has any further horrible Wilco beer puns, send them to @WilcoNews on Twitter, and hashtag it #Wilcobeernames. Or you can leave a comment. Either way (see what I did there?).
Naming sandwiches after Wilco songs; that's not so much weird as it is awesome.
The Sky Blue Sky Sandwich Company (openly referencing Sky Blue Sky; say what you will about Canadians – at least they’re honest) aptly names each if its food items after Wilco songs. I know what you’re thinking. “Does this mean that if I order the Less Than You Think I’ll have to listen to ten minutes of guitar feedback?” I would assume not, though I’ve never eaten at the place. You can, however, experience Outtasite (Outta Mind) and She’s A Jar in a way that you (probably) never have: with a pickle.
"How To Fight Loneliness" consists of contains slices of chicken, apple and bacon all on "toasty naan-like bread."
Has this piqued your curiosity? It’s definitely piqued mine-though I am a sucker for rock n’ roll-themed food. You can check their menu out here for the latest on Wilco-titled sandwiches from One Wing to Hoodoo Voodoo. As if you needed another reason to envy Canada. I will say this though. I haven’t been able to stop thinking of other Wilco sandwich names. I know you didn’t ask to hear them, but here they are:
Muzzle of Bees
Honeycomb cereal, bananas and salami all on cold Honey Wheat bread with honey mustard
Sunken Treasure
“It’s like eating a pirate!” Fried starfish, seaweed and pastrami on a pan-fried pair of boxer shorts with honey mustard
Candy Floss
Candy. Floss. Honey mustard.
That name again is Mr. Plow. Er-ah- Sky Blue Sky.
Naming Wilco sandwiches. Is that a career I could corner jump in on? I could do that all day. Though in the interest of your sanity and mine, I won’t. We’ve got to press on to other weird business. I mean that literally; this next guy’s name is Jake Weird:
Tweedy. Gyllenhall. Do I smell a cage match?
Jake has a thing for comparing Jeff Tweedy to actors, apparently. In one post he put up a bunch of pictures comparing the Wilco frontman to Jake Gyllenhall (pictured right), and in a more recent post, compared Tweedy to Emile Hirsch.
I’m not going to speak for everyone when I say this, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying, “Ah. You lost me.” For those of Tweed-Hirsch-llynhall heads who agree with Mr. Weird, check out his site here.
Mr. Tweedy’s all about the diet slush drinks.
Say the first name that pops into your head when you read the following combination of words: “Diet Coke” “Slurpee” “Folk Fest.” If you said “Nelson Mandela,” you’d be wrong. The name that you should have thought of was Jeff Tweedy.
An excerpt from SwerveCalgary.com tells the gripping (kinda) tale of one Folk Fest Volunteer’s at-first disappointing meeting with Wilco’s frontman, while revealing a ‘s strange, possibly short-fused side of Tweedy that many of us would not think exists.
Linden, can you go get Jeff Tweedy?’ ” The request marked Linden Ritchie’s first gig as a ground-transportation volunteer, a coveted position the musician/waste-management consultant says he begged for. “I’m like Forrest Gump,” says Ritchie. “I’ve met some pretty incredible people in my life, and I like that this role is where the common person meets with fame.” So, did his heart skip a beat when Wilco’s front man climbed into his van? “No. I’d never heard of him and anyway, he wasn’t friendly. He sat in the back and focused on his Blackberry for the entire 10-minute ride from his hotel to the Island.” When Ritchie turned on the radio, he says Tweedy glared at him and barked ‘Turn that down!’ “I wasn’t too impressed.”
Weird, right? It gets a bit weirder. Check here for the full story.
Uh-oh. Did you hear that? That sound means it’s time for the lightning round!
This article from Jew Eat Yet? (which gets my full and undying respect if only for the name) from Danny Miller, brother-in-law of Jeff Tweedy, is a very sweet recount of Tweedy’s 40th birthday in 2007.
This is a sweet video of Glenn Kotche composing Drum-kit quartets:
This is a story on Marina City in Chicago, the towers on the cover of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The AV Club also did a great piece on the “Wilco towers,” as they are now more commonly known.
This is a chat room for fans of Wilco. You know, like in case you time travel back to 1997 and are 12 years old.
This isn’t Wilco (the band) at all! Definitely signed up for the wrong mailing list. On the plus side, I’ve now got enough pop rivets to sink a battleship.
This is a glow-in-the-dark Wilco yo-yo! Yes, you read that correctly.
Finally, to end this week in weird, strange and interesting Wilco News, here are some rejected covers for Wilco’s last full-length album, Wilco (the album). I tried to pick and choose the best and least disturbing ones, but if you’d like to see them all (at your own risk) check out The Hidden Track.
Via Glide Magazine’s The Hidden Track:
Man, that was a lot of stuff! Weirded out enough? If not, check out some odd yet awesome covers of songs by and of Wilco.
And if you haven’t pre-orderedThe Whole Love yet, what’samadda you?
You can play the guitar with your teeth you say? Good for you. But can you be Nels Cline and play the guitar with your teeth? Didn't think so.
In the same vein as The Tweedy Feed, I decided to create Cline Time, a source for the latest dirt on our favorite Cline: Nels. It’s kind of like the Frasier to The Tweedy Feed’s Cheers; kind of a spinoff, but very much it’s own thing (though I did try to get that delightful dog to appear in here. He said no.). Actually, it’s a lot more like The Colbert Report to The Daily Show. That’s a much better analogy; I don’t know why I said that other thing. Forget that I did, all right?
In any case, forgetting all sitcom spinoffs, many of us Wilco fans have gotten so caught up in the frenzy of anticipation and anxiety (what, you don’t have anxiety?) for The Whole Loveand Wilco’s upcoming tour, we overlooked another major album release earlier this summer: BB&C (Tim Berne, Jim Black and Nels Cline)’s live album, The Veil. To many of us Wilco fans, Nels Cline is the underrated, under-appreciated, incredibly talented guitar god from Wilco; however, what many of us don’t realize is that he is one hell of an experimental free Jazz-rock musician. And he’s out there. Like Sun Ra On Jupiter out there.
Don’t believe me? Take a pull on this: It’s called “Caved-In Heart Blues” from Cline’s 2007 album, Draw Breath. It has come close to replacing Neil Young’s For The Turnstiles as the song I will hear in my head just before I go insane. Which is pretty high praise coming from me.
Did you listen to it? Pretty out there, right? Yet it’s somehow very soothing. It might be the molasses-drippingly slow tempo. Which is kind of a good thing.
Here’s a pretty sweet video of Cline performing with the Les Paul Trio in New York at Iridium last Monday:
Awesome distractions aside, The Veil, the latest from Cline, Black, and Berne (or BB&C, as they’re also known, which I like because you can hold the Shift bar the entire time you type it in) has been getting some pretty great reviews so far, and judging from Railroaded, the free MP3 download from last month, (which you can download here), they all seem justified in their praise. Here are some reviews for the record so far:
The Veil is a rapturous performance from three of New York City’s most electrifying talents at the last vestige for improvisational music left standing in Manhattan following the Blue Condo-ization of the Lower East Side.
Cover from The Veil. Anybody else getting a Tom Waits-y vibe?
From the opening passages you can tell that these are masters at work. Behind the doors of their industrial space, they are wrapping Waterford crystals in sheet-metal and playing catch. They are sprinkling machine nuts in the gears watching it sputter and spit out twisted scraps and unanticipated treasures.
… [The Veil performances were] mostly two continuous improvised performances from musicians who have no fear of going into simultaneous improvisation that might scare other musicians back to law school. The kind of meeting of minds that both jazz and bands like Wilco need.
The combination of the three, which for a time went under the name Sons of Champignon, makes for an alchemical fusing of explosive out-jazz and apocalyptic rock punctuated by moments of delicate beauty.
This is Tinariwen. They are going to make beautiful music with Nels Cline. I'm going to buy it. Probably.
As if all this wasn’t enough for Nels, he’s also recorded an all-acoustic album called Tassili with a band called Tinariwen (here’s a little taste), who are, I kid you not, a group of nomadic Tuareg tribesmen who fought in Mali’s civil war. Also featured on the album are Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio and the horn players of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Is it cool if I speak for everyone on this one? Well I’m going to: “If I don’t get to hear this soon, I’m going to do something drastic. Like cancel my Spotify subscription. Which I don’t have.”
You’ve got time for one more awesome video before you go to bed, or work, or some other website, right? Good. Because this one’s pretty wild. I will end this edition of Cline Time with a video of Nels Cline playing the (kickass) solo to “Impossible Germany,” which so far is the frontrunner for this week’s poll. Please enjoy:
Solid Sound Fest ended June 26th, but that shouldn't stop us from living vicariously through videos & photos. Also, look at that bird! It's playing the guitar! How 'bout that!
While you’re registering for presales and waiting for tickets to go on sale for Wilco’s fall tour (or loudly sobbing in your shower wearing nothing but a pair of cutoff jeans because the tickets you wanted sold out; I know I am), why not take a gander at some of these photos and videos from 2011′s Solid Sound Festival, featuring performances from cream-of-the-crop artists from around the music, art and comedy worlds? Yeah, that was a long sentence. Yes, it’s right. No, don’t spell check it.
Here’s a few more videos of performances from Solid Sound Fest, for your listening (and watching) pleasure:
