An Open Letter to Jeff Tweedy of Wilco

Dear Mr. Tweedy:


I really wish I liked Wilco (The Album) as much as I like Wilco (The Band).

Wilco (The Song) starts off promising, with a charging wall of bluesy guitar sound. But the lyrics, a tongue-in-cheek love letter from your band to its fans, feel flat and uninspired, a lazy victory lap rather than an exploration of new territory.

I’m sorry, Mr. Tweedy, if I’m hating on you for loving on me. There are some great moments here, to be sure; the next two songs rank among your band’s best work. But all in all, the album has a slightly generic feel. There’s a taste of almost everything your band’s done—the pastoral melodies of Sky Blue Sky and the pleasant pop of Summerteeth and the guitar workouts of A Ghost is Born and the countrified psychedelia of Being There and the experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But so many tastes end up making for a relatively bland album, at least by your band’s standards. It’s almost as if you put your discography in a blender and hit “Puree.” A little bit of everything ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

Well, maybe that’s a little harsh, but I do mean it, or something like it. You sound content and philosophical and meditative—on “Solitaire,” you mention how it “took too long for me to see I was wrong to believe in me only,” and that sounds like a statement from a healthy and happy and well-adjusted individual. But is that what we want? I kinda miss the alienation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and elsewhere, the angsty Jeff Tweedy that sang “I am so out of tune with you” on Being There’s “Sunken Treasure.” Granted, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again, and I don’t necessarily want that. But I do want something with a solid thematic feel, something that feels like itself, rather than a mix of other things. In some ways, your previous album, though it had fewer rough edges, was a bolder statement, in that it was at least a solid and consistent and thematically whole piece of work. That one, and every other album since A.M. felt like an artistic statement, a “This is what Wilco is” kind of gesture that somehow also expanded the definition of what Wilco was. This one feels like a question in response to a question, as if someone asked “What is Wilco?” and you replied, “Well, what do you want us to be, baby?”

I’m sorry if I was harsh. This isn’t goodbye; it’s still a see-you-later. Look around for me the next hometown gig; I’ll be the one wearing a party hat.

Love,

Alfonso