DB's Song of the Day (day 236): "VIA CHICAGO" (1999) Wilco

Today’s song is in honor of tomorrow’s birthday boy, Jeff Tweedy, frontman for Wilco, and for yesterday’s birthday boy, my friend Andrew, something of a Wilco fan, among other things. His suggestion was “Hummingbird” from A Ghost is Born (2004). Not a bad choice because, as it happens, that’s one of the few songs I know on that album, which is not one of my favorites by Wilco. As the follow up to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), the breakthrough album to me, Ghost moved from the over-dubbed deconstructions of Foxtrot to something a bit more guitar-based. I saw Wilco live only once and it was on Ghost’s tour which felt a little too much like a bid for “classic rock” status. In fact, the next album, Sky Blue Sky (2007), which I liked quite a bit better and return to quite a bit, earned the epithet “dad-rock” from the pundits. Fair enough, I suppose, and maybe I should choose a song from that to add to the plethora of dad-rock in this series (my choice would be “Either Way”). But I’m not going there.

I’m going back to the album before Foxtrot, when Jay Bennett—who was dismissed after that album, and died in 2009—was still a force in the band. Bennett’s intense work on Foxtrot had much to do with that album’s unique qualities, I believe. And its predecessor, Summerteeth, has many qualities in common with it, which is why I chose to go back from Foxtrot rather than forward. A way of saying that those two albums are still the peak of Wilco, even if I do consider Tweedy to have become “the voice” of his time—the Aughts—the way Michael Stipe was for the Eighties. The “voice” possessing particular aural qualities that are not only immediately recognizable, but also expressive in a way that is simply more than usually suitable. Tweedy’s shaky, scratchy voice seems always on the verge of a panic attack or recovering from some shambling bout of inner-demon wrestling. And that works for me.

That quality is perhaps nowhere as evident as on “Via Chicago,” a song full of a kind of uneasy psychological détente with such demons as may always be present. I’m not sure when I first picked up Summerteeth, but I know it was not until after Ghost disappointed me, and after I saw the band live. I became a bit more thorough about picking up the threads. And this is the song that struck me as the unavoidable song. How can you resist a song that opens with “I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt alright to me”? Elsewhere the lyrics get a bit disjointed, perhaps to simulate the breakdown the speaker is facing—risking, perhaps—in this exposure of his own jugular. When you go on record saying it felt alright to dream of killing someone, it tends to put the spotlight on you.

But the song has a kind of resilience that appeals to me. The feeling that the bleakest moments generally point the way out. In this case, the reiterations—in those unmistakeable Tweedy tones—“I’m coming home / I’m coming home / Via Chicago” sound frayed but assertive. He’s coming home, goddamn it! Then it switches to “Searching for a home / Via Chicago,” which might be a way of saying it's shifting from coming back to thinking about going on. That alone is a touch subtle enough to keep us with him, late in the song.

The part that screams “great lyric” is the section when he assumes he’ll “make it back / One of these days” and turn on “your TV” to “watch a man with a face like mine / Being chased down a busy street.” Nothing like paranoia via media to buck you up for the inner shit-storm.

The musical soundscape is redolent of “dad-rock” in the best sense: the kind of experimental uses of odd instrumentation—love the mellotron, guys!—that created the shifting sense of possibility in some of the great records of the Sixties and Seventies. Albums that Bennett and Tweedy loved too. When I come upon musicians who have been marked by the music that marked me, I tend to respond. At a certain point I find myself asking if their work measures up. A song like “Via Chicago” convinces me not only in terms of its musical pedigree—if you will—but in the “writing a song to save my soul” standard that applies, in some cases—and they know who they are!

Buried you alive in a fireworks display / Raining down on me

DB's Song of the Day (day 165): "ASHES OF AMERICAN FLAGS" (2002) Wilco

Today is Flag Day, a national “holiday” of sorts meant to honor the adoption of the stars and stripes as our nation’s standard. I don’t have much to say about all that, except to use the fact as a pretext for today’s song, from Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002). The song, on an album released in the year following the attacks on 9/11/01, had a great deal of urgency and poignancy, even if it was composed and recorded before that landmark event.

In any case, it’s obviously not a stridently topical song. In fact, its relation to its moment is largely one of matching its mood to those very tense and chastened and overwrought days, something I did more or less instinctively in 2003 when I first heard the record. The song’s immediate concern is the singer brooding on his own state of mind as he withdraws cash from an ATM. Or rather, he uses the interaction with the cash machine to reflect on his own state, a state in which “diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes” stand for minor addictions—like cash itself. It’s a stark opening in its everydayness, and the everydayness is what the singer is having trouble dealing with. “I’m down on my hands and knees / Everytime I hear a doorbell ring.” There’s a feeling of paranoia there, but also a kind of shambling agoraphobia and disassociation. The song in many ways is simply a representation of the overt self-consciousness of the speaker, including a comment on how he feels when he hears himself sing.

And no wonder. That voice is so strained, stretched to what feels like a limit of communication. Tweedy delivers, in the sound of his singing, a kind of nails on a chalkboard feel, a quavering mess of anxiety. The unease is best found in the bathos of “All my lies are always wishes / I know I would die if I could come back new.” A very great articulation of a very deep malaise. The idea that one lies against the world—or, as poets, against time (earlier Tweedy muses “I wonder why we listen to poets when nobody gives a fuck”)—for the sake of a wish that things were better will take us far into the kind of desperate sacrifice for the sake of wish-fulfillment that was swallowing the country in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster. Tweedy, I suspect, only means to express his own view that he lies from a wish to change or to make his situation seem better, and that, if death could bring that change, he would be willing to die, to be reborn as something better. Sacrifice for the sake of wish-fulfillment and a kind of immortality through sacrifice is the note that makes the song considerably relevant to its moment.

Paranoia, a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo, and a desperate longing to make it better, by lies if necessary. Sounds like the early 2000s to me. “We want a good life with a nose for things / The fresh wind and bright sky to endure my suffering.” The conditions of existence are never what we would like them to be, and Tweedy’s song registers that with its very ragged delivery matched with a recording that seems to placate us at times with sweetly delivered embellishments, only to become overwhelmed by distortion and dissonance in the song’s close.

The closing verse: “I would like to salute / Ashes of American flags / And all the fallen leaves / Filling up shopping bags” is one of the best statements capturing the days of the clean-up of the obliterated towers and the flurry of flag-waving that led us into a war that produced still more casualties. Ashes of American flags, of course, brings to mind the burning of flags as a protest against the Vietnam War and, since Tweedy is singing this before the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan began, that’s the idea we should be thinking of, I assume. Saluting the ashes is not the same as saluting the flags, so that he seems to be saluting the act of burning the flag, or, perhaps, the residue that remains after that defiant, symbolic act. But, in the context of the death and destruction in New York, the ashes of the fallen Americans become a referent even as we might want to burn some of the flag-waving jingoism that intoxicated almost the entire country. And those fallen leaves filling up shopping bags—besides a great image that joins the “blight man was born for” with endless consumerism (the American way)—can’t help but remind us of fallen soldiers filling up body bags.  The salute here is to the casualties, recognizing that death—whether for one’s country or while simply going about one’s normal everyday business—is the nature of things, caught up with fallen leaves and everything else that falls, such as confidence in the economy, our leaders, our institutions and the very emblems we use to stand for the state of our union with the State. In the end, even flags are fragile and flammable.

Oh, speaking of tomorrow, how will it ever come?

DB's Song of the Day (day 117): "KAMERA" (2002) Wilco

The word “limbo,” what does it mean? A word for a liminal state between places—earth and heaven, say—it’s supposed to indicate a sort of anteroom to paradise. You have to stay there till Christ frees you because you were good but you weren’t baptized (babies) or you were good but had the misfortune to live before Christ came (the patriarchs, for instance). It’s not the same as Purgatory, which is for regular people who just need to atone enough to move on. Limbo, though, has a catchier sound than Purgatory, so it’s easy to use the word for that space of purgation. The place you’re stuck in till “something” saves you and you can move on.

That’s the way I felt from about January 2001 till early 2009. You might ask what was happening in that span of time. The answer is easy: W. was inaugurated in January 2001 and left office in January 2009. Those eight years of his reign were years waiting for something to save us, collectively. Nothing did. Anyway, that was also the time when I was working on a big writing project, revising over and over so as to remain in limbo, so to speak. It was like treading a wheel, except that there was forward progress.

My 40s, which otherwise were good, took place in a period it still irks me to think about. For part of that time I was still expanding the CD collection by getting stuff I had on vinyl only. Five CDs in the changer was the typical way to listen and I was bored by records. Now, I rarely listen to music from that time as it’s only on CD. So I have to make an effort to go “back to limbo” and its music.

One of the key albums of that time was Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), which I first heard probably in the spring of 2003, so it’s right there in the heart of Limbo 1, since my 1st draft was completed in 2003, and that’s when Kajsa graduated college. So, yeah, Limbo, phase 1, could be said to last through her Baltimore years. A time when we both came into some new music, but much of that was music new to us that had actually been around for a long time.  In some cases, it was new to CD.

In picking today’s song, I listened to YHF again. And a damn good album it is. It’s the album that really broke things open for Wilco, which had been, till then, for the most part, a descendant of “classic rock.” Peppy songs, marked by touches from the Neil Young songbook, The Band, and others strong in my system of things. Just not anything major. YHF is major.

“Kamera,” with its brisk, easygoing sound, is a favorite. It feels sunny and bright—like today—but the lyrics belie that buzz. “Phone my family / Tell them I’m lost on the sidewalk / And no it’s not OK.” That’s got something of the “limbo” quality right there. Everything seemed fine on the surface but there’s was something definitely “not OK” that was eating away at things. “Which lies I’ve been hiding / Which echoes belong”—that has the tug toward some of those darker undercurrents, and maybe even the kind of dissociation that we can be glad to hear given an upbeat tune.

It’s that background guitar that buoys us creating that sense of “echoes” that keep a parallel melody going, almost. And synths, like they used to sound! “I’m counting on / A heart I know by heart / To walk me through this war / Memories distort.” Yeah, the Iraq War is one of those things “not OK” that’s in the background (remember “Mission Accomplished”?), and when the background voices start singing “tell them I’m lost” we can start to feel a slight edge of desperation creeping into Tweedy’s always anxious voice.

And yet it’s hard to hear this song as real cry for help. It strikes me more as someone playing with that idea. Like: I might lose it at any minute, but, for now, I can still declaim this little ditty about it. In any case, this album does mark the time I’m aiming at when I mention Limbo 1. I’ve taken a stab at some other songs from those days but not in any abundance. Part of that has to do with not being very present then, if you know what I mean. “Counting on a heart I know by heart” might mean yourself, or at least I was then engaged in deciding “which echoes belong,” but the echoes I was listening for came from way back there in 1978. Thirty years gone by the time Limbo 2 ended. It’s harder to claim the heart of Limbo—I just don’t know it or its songs “by heart”—but this LP gets us back there.