Wilco

Wilco is alternative rock/alt-country band from Chicago. After the band Uncle Tupelo split, Jay Farrar started Son Volt while Jeff Tweedy started Wilco. Originally the band had a heavy alternative country influence, but shifted in a more Progressive Rock direction with later releases. In addition to their original work, they also released two CDs in collaboration with English folksinger Billy Bragg, in which they took unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics and set them to music.

Discography:

• A.M.(1995)
• Being There (1996)
• Summerteeth (1999)
• Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)
• A Ghost Is Born (2004)
• Kicking Television Live (2005)
• Sky Blue Sky (2007)
• Wilco (The Album) (2009)
• The Whole Love (2011)

With Billy Bragg:

• Mermaid Avenue (1998)
• Mermaid Avenue Vol. II (2000)

DVDs:

• I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco (2002)
• Ashes of American Flags (2009)

Wilco provides examples of the following tropes:

• Album Title Drop: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in "Poor Places".
• Animated Music Video: The music video for "Dawned on Me", featuring none other than Popeye and the band itself.
• Creator Breakdown: Jeff Tweedy was under the influence of painkillers due to migraines, had panic attacks and depression and went to rehab in 2004 shortly before the release of A Ghost is Born. Notably, one of his major panic attacks happened about 12 hours after he was interviewed by Chuck Klosterman for SPIN. Klosterman noted in his article that Tweedy seemed completely normal during his interview.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Averted. They encourage recording of their live shows.
• Executive Meddling: The story behind Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The band was signed to Reprise Records, and upon the final master of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot being played to the suits, they claimed that they heard no single on the album and asked the band to record the album again. They refused. After a bit of wrangling, the band was able to leave Reprise with the masters to their album. They put the album's tracks up for streaming on their website while their waited to find a new label. They chose Nonesuch Records, a much more artist-friendly label with a roster full of similar artists. However, Nonesuch was owned by Warner Music, who also owned Reprise. Jeff Tweedy loves to point out that basically, Warner paid for an album they initially did not want twice.
  • There's a bit of a happy ending to this story: The suits at Warner Music and Reprise felt really ashamed after the album's release about how they treated Wilco ^[1], and they later decreed that other acclaimed but uncommercial alternative bands on their roster, such as The Flaming Lips, would never again feel like they were being unappreciated by Warner.
• Generation Xerox: Tweedy's son Spencer is a talented musician in his own right.
• Likes Older Women: Tweedy's wife is almost exactly ten years older than him.
• Rockumentary: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.
• Shout-Out: Being There, to the film of the same name.
• Word Salad Lyrics: According to Tweedy himself, the lyrics to "Born Alone" were inspired by picking out random words from a book of 19th-century American poetry.

1. ↑ Yes, their feelings did partially have to do with the fact that the album that they dismissed as "uncommercial" wound up selling more than any other Wilco or Nonesuch Records album up to that point, in addition to being a critical smash