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.
- From Indieshuffle.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.
Anyway, Enjoy!
