Wilco Launches Blue Sky Blue

One of my favorite bands is Wilco and today we saw the U.S. launch of Wilco’s new album entitled “Blue Sky Blue“. The common ground about this album for the current incarnation of the band—a six-piece lineup that includes founding bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and guitarist Nels Cline—is the music made between 1966 and 1974, Tweedy says. The band even recorded the music on a 2-inch reel-to-reel tape machine instead of computers, which is practically unheard of in today’s production world. It requires a band to essentially record complete takes of a song rather than overdub and edit parts at will.

Jeff Tweedy told the Chicago Tribune “We built this studio and this environment to allow that to happen without a clock ticking,”. “No headphones, vocal mic 4 feet in front of the drum kit. Not a lot of separation between the instruments. Everything had to happen at the same time.”

Stirratt sounds almost relieved when describing the process. “It was the fastest record we’d done in a long time: a two-week recording session. I think 95 percent of the great rock music in the world is stuff that hasn’t been labored over too much.”

The last three Wilco albums have been labored affairs: meticulously constructed and then deconstructed in the recording studio. The results were extraordinary, producing at least one masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), but the band’s lineup was in constant flux.

Tweedy and Stirratt have been the sole constants in the band over its 12-year history, and they have weathered many changes in personnel, some of them tumultuous. But after A Ghost is Born was released in 2004, the band’s volatile internal chemistry stabilized. The current incarnation of Wilco is also the longest lived, at a mere three years. Blue Sky Blue is as much a testament to that stability as anything else.

Check it out on I-Tunes here.