Sky Blue Sky That's the title of Wilco's new album, and if it suggests a more pastoral vibe than it conjured on its last few discs, well, that is indeed the case.
The band's previous two studio discs, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born were definite breakthroughs. On those discs, it expanded the group's audience outside the hard-core alt-country fan base of its early years, as they began experimenting with atonal guitar bursts, audio-verite sonic clutter, mind-warp special effects and a "compressed" sound that struck some as tension-building and some as just plain claustrophobic.
But Sky Blue Sky is, in some ways, a return to the organic alt-country sound of the band's beginnings -- minus the gritty Stonesy guitar scrapple, but heavy on the stoner-country-folk vibe of Gram Parsons. Those were two of the major touchstones of the band's 1995 debut, A.M., and, to a lesser degree, its follow-up, Being There.
Sky Blue Sky is also the first studio release for the current line-up, which, in addition to founders Jeff Tweedy (singer and primary songwriter) and bassist John Stirratt, also includes guitar hero Nels Cline, drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone.
The melodrama and revolving-door personnel changes that began after Being There are now part of Wilco lore, but the most dramatic of those was the departure of longtime multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett. The strained relationship between he and group leader Tweedy -- both in terms of their differing personalities and their struggle to take the band's sound in different directions -- was captured, sometimes painfully, in the documentary "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," which set out to offer a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of Foxtrot, but ultimately proved to be an almost unwatchable elegy marking the disintegration of Wilco as we knew them.
By the time Foxtrot and the film were released, Bennett had been jettisoned from the band. At the heart of the conflict was that Bennett was seemingly struggling to keep the band on the rootsier path, whether you want to call it alt-country or just plain old roots-rock. Meanwhile, Tweedy seemed to favor a more experimental route and was more enamored of the studio as an extra instrument. At the time, his ethos was summed up thusly: "We can do so much in the studio that we can't do live, so why not take advantage of those capabilities?"
Certainly, the addition of Cline on guitar led the band in an edgier and more experimental direction, given his harmonically ambitious avant-jazz-rock guitar excursions: You could hardly avoid hearing his Herculean, white-noise imprint on the Kicking Television: Live in Chicago CD in '95 -- a disc that inspired Rolling Stone to anoint Wilco as "America's foremost rock impressionists."
But Tweedy has always liked to go out on the road as a solo act once every couple of years, and perhaps his last solo jaunt, in '05, led him to appreciate the more organic aspects of Wilco's music.
So, on Sky Blue Sky, the band seemed to retreat back to the spare, "live in the studio" approach, minus the electronic wicky-wacky. Earlier this year, Tweedy remarked that he is now favoring the ethos employed by The Band during the sessions for Music From Big Pink and The Band LPs back in the late '60s.
On Sky Blue Sky, Cline again makes his presence felt, with gorgeous, cascading solos on several tracks -- in some cases evoking Jerry Garcia's more tuneful, pointillistic work during the Grateful Dead's back-to-the-country move in 1970 following their knotty, lysergically-enhanced explorations on Live Dead in 1969.
Tweedy's signature pensiveness does indeed still permeate many of Wilco's songs. For those who thought that Tweedy's 2005 emergence from clinical depression -- and an addiction to prescription medication -- might lead to a peppier and more rocking set of tunes: well, just let this be a lesson that not all melancholy states of mind are rooted in pathology. Some writers are just drawn to more introspective, soul-bearing fare, and Tweedy is clearly one of them.
After all of the comings and goings over the years, it's impossible to say whether the current Wilco line-up will settle into any kind of long-term stability. But Tweedy is hopeful, and for the time being, he seems content with the simpatico between all the players.
"This is a new feeling for me," says Wilco in the band's current bio. "If we all lived together, we'd be like The Monkees."
Wilco will be performing with Low at Ovens Auditorium on June 20 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $32.