“And just to be safe, we decided to just have some fun and track for a couple more weeks — dig up all kinds of stuff and track it, and not feel a whole lot of pressure, because we felt like we only needed like maybe four more songs to finish out a record….And then when we got done, we looked at how much stuff we had to mix, and we had almost 30 songs. So we had to prioritize, because we really didn’t have enough time to mix all of them. We got it down to about 21 songs, and we ended up mixing 19.
“The idea was, for a while, to try and whittle it down to 14 or 15 songs. And then I just started feeling like I really had an idea of how I wanted the record to be, and I realized at the end that it made more sense to include everything and not really edit it — just let it be this kind of bulky conglomerate. There are so many different styles attempted, and some of them come off better than others, but for the most part, it just felt like when you started taking elements away, the overall feel of it wasn’t as free. It just felt like it was trying to force it into one category or another, and it seemed more honest to just try and let it be what it is.”
Which is all well and good from an artistic standpoint — but this is about the time you’d expect the powers-that-be (Warner/Reprise, in this case) to start hemming and hawing at such an unorthodox proposition. Was it a struggle to sell the double-album idea to the label? “Surprisingly not,” Tweedy answers. “For the most part, once the few people that were involved in it got to hear it, they were amazingly supportive. We really didn’t get too much of a battle out of them. In fact, we kind of left it up in the air with a couple of them — like, if it was gonna be an enormous problem, we’d consider making it a single CD. And we actually got a couple calls back saying that they thought it was a really cool idea trying to get it to work as a double CD.”
With a little number-crunching and some decisions on packaging — the discs will be released in a cardboard case that’s “kind of like a mini-record, it folds out and has pouches for each CD,” Tweedy says — the label and the band worked out a way to keep costs down enough for the double album to be reasonably priced. “I think it’s going to be like the high end of a single-disc list price,” he said. “The only way I think it would go up to a regular double-disc price is if it sold like 500,000 copies. And that probably won’t happen,” he added with a modest chuckle.
Probably not — but then again, there is a song on here that could potentially launch Wilco into the commercial stratosphere. It’s called “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”, or “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”, depending on which version you’re referring to. It appears on the record twice, first in a straight-ahead, immediately catchy, rocked-up version that just might be Wilco’s ticket to massive rock-radio acceptance. The second version is a delightfully laid-back, easygoing take that sounds straight off of a classic Beach Boys record.
Latent and/or blatant Brian Wilson influences are apparent elsewhere as well, while the backing-vocal chants on “I Got You” and a couple other tracks are clearly patterned after vintage Rolling Stones cuts. The swirling moods and changes of “Misunderstood” recall some of the Beatles’ latter-day pop experiments; on “Sunken Treasure”, meanwhile, Tweedy’s plaintive voice seems a dead ringer for Paul Westerberg. Surely they were aware when they were laying down these tracks that many of these parallels would be drawn by the listeners…
“I wanted it to be really obvious that our influences are there and acknowledged,” Tweedy readily admits, “because I don’t hear people quoting each other very much anymore, or being really up-front about stuff like that. And it all comes from somewhere, you know. I wanted it to kind of sound like we were playing our record collections — like this garage band is just plowing through their record collection and pillaging it, and having a good time doing it.”
There’s a similarly up-front and out-in-the-open essence to much of the album’s lyrical content. Several of the songs speak directly from the experiences of a lifelong musician — which, though it sometimes results in rather insular subject matter, is an honest portrayal from a guy who has been playing in bands since his high school days.
Tweedy says this lyrical perspective was intentional as well. “Without being overly arty about the whole thing, I really did have a lot of ideas about how I wanted people to hear this collection of music,” he says. “And along with wanting it to sound like, as a band, that we were playing through our record collection, I also really wanted there to be songs where I totally came out of character, completely straightforward, and said, ‘Look, this is all I know.’ Like in a movie — a comparison would be when somebody looks at the screen and comes out of character and says, ‘Don’t listen to me. I’ve really no idea what I’m talking about. Except that I really care a whole lot about what I’m doing.’ And right now it’s a struggle for me to come to terms with people paying attention to me, on any level.”
