The nicest bassist in rock speaks candidly about expectations, the passing of Jay Bennett, and the band's love of psychedelics (no, it's not what you're thinking) | There are some things John Stirratt may never understand. Cell phones, for example. “Can you hold on?” he interrupts while answering a question about the tour his band Wilco recently kicked off, which includes a stop at Frawley Stadium on Friday, July 10. “I’m on the tour manager’s phone and it’s f—king buzzing like a motherf—ker.” It’s the only burst of profanity the ultra-polite bassist—a founding member, with singer, songwriter, and guitarist Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, as well as a player in Tweedy’s previous band, Uncle Tupelo—will utter over the next 30 minutes, spoken with Southern gentlemanly aplomb (Stirratt was born in New Orleans and grew up in Mandeville, La.). Technology plays an interesting role for Stirratt and the rest of Wilco with the recent release of the band’s almost-self-titled record, Wilco (the Album). Indebted, in places, to the orchestral rock of the ’60s, and sporting a bizarre cover that nods to the decade’s psychedelic bombast (think Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or the Monkees’ Head), Wilco (the Album) got updated for the aughts when the band streamed the record in its entirety on their website after it leaked online in mid-May. It’s got one hand on the “Magic Bus” steering wheel and the other on a mouse. But like everything Wilco have done since they formed in 1995—seven studio albums; nine if you count the Mermaid Avenue collaborations with Billy Bragg—Wilco (the Album) makes a lot more sense over time. Weirdness gives way to fragility, then beauty, until the songs unfold in a way that makes them feel individual and yet impossible without each other. During a break one morning while the band was in Spain gearing up for its current our, Stirratt spoke with O&A about the ideas and process behind the new album, the importance of time away from Wilco, and why he’s no John Entwistle. |
How much of the new album have you been playing live? | About four or five songs. It’s sort of, y’know, due to the advent of YouTube—we didn’t want every tune from the record to be online and accessible before the release date. I think we all have this desire for a little bit of surprise the day the record comes out. |
It’s been the practice of the band to stream your albums online before they come out, anyway. Yeah, and I think we were one of the first bands to do that, with Yankee Hotel [Foxtrot], albeit for different reasons at the time. It’s really part of the process for every band now. Everyone’s record is out there two months beforehand, so a month and a half isn’t really that bad. Yankee Hotel was something like eight months before the actual release [laughs]. I think it’s generally a great thing, though. If you’ve made a great record, it’s OK to preview it. |
What’s the story behind the title of the new album? Why not just call it Wilco? | We had “Wilco (the Song)” around for a while, and that sort of came in the early stages of making the record. We all liked the idea of calling it “the Song,” and the parenthetical thing came along later. Usually, a phrase from the lyrics will come out and sort of capture the whole piece. But we didn’t really have that this time. I think it was Jeff’s idea to have a parenthetical title, and we liked the generic quality of it. We dug the humor more than anything. I think on the album cover, too…Over the years, our humor has never been represented very well [laughs]. |
The cover took a lot of people by surprise. Is there a meaning, or is the randomness of it supposed to be the meaning? | We were sort of taken with these carnivalesque photos from a lot of ’60s bands, like The Who’s “Magic Bus” promo pictures and The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. We thought we might try to get a picture like that to sort of counter the institutional quality of our name. We thought it would be a funny juxtaposition. |
Speaking of ’60s bands, the new album seems to have, for lack of a better term, a Beatlesque feel, especially on “Deeper Down,” which sounds like a Sgt. Pepper outtake. Is it accurate to say this is your Beatles album? | I think on “Everlasting” and “Deeper Down”—the more orchestrated stuff—I think we all have a real appreciation for some of that baroque rock: the Zombies; Left Banke; Beatles, of course. I think there’s a lot of that music in our collections between us. I don’t know if we could attribute it to just the Beatles, but they’re sort of hovering over everything, in a way. They’re so part of the culture now. |
It seems there’s this idea that maybe Jeff goes off and writes these weird little pop songs, brings them back to the rest of the band, and you guys sort of jam it out until things feel right. I’m curious how true that is. How exactly does a Wilco album come together? | I’m probably good at describing the latest one, because with every record the process has been slightly different and the people have been different. With this one, Jeff did have a lot of material coming in, much more so than the last record. And we sketched things out more in the studio, where as on Sky Blue Sky, it was more about trying to perfect the live version of the song. There was a lot more post-production this time, more overdubs and sculpting. We sketched things out, then we re-recorded the basics in New Zealand, in a more high-fidelity environment. We’ve worked in similar ways before, but this record has a lot of variation, so we were all over the place in the recording process as well. |
Watching I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, there was a lot of build-up for you guys to be making a new album, because Yankee Hotel was supposed to be your breakthrough. And those expectations have stayed with the band ever since. How much do expectations play in the creative process now? Oh, I think very little. There’s always been a hermetic side to the band, a really insulated space in the studio where we don’t think so much about that. Those expectations you’re speaking of might come very late in the process. Like, a journalist just brought to mind that [guitarist] Nels [Cline] is not as represented on this record. And it’s like, within the song, you’re very close in to it, trying to make it work, and those other things don’t really come into play at all. I remember so much disappointment after A Ghost Is Born, because it was the record after Yankee Hotel, which was a quantum leap for us in terms of sales. [Editor’s Note: Billboard figures have put YHF at nearly 600,000 copies sold.] It was like, Well, we’re always going to disappoint people, but hopefully we can make more people happy than we disappoint. I think that’s been the thinking of the band. |
You guys all dabble in side projects or solo things outside the band. How crucial is that to the foundation of Wilco? Is that the secret, that you have these other outlets and Wilco exists on its own? | It is quite a luxury to be able to do those things. And I can speak for everyone on that—Nels had quite a career before joining the band, so it’s sort of a given that Wilco is just a part of his musical world. I think for everyone, it’s a great way to see how the other half lives—to remind yourself how hard it can be to put out records and tour [laughs]. |
As the only other original member in the band besides Jeff, looking back over 14 years and seven albums under your belt, how would you define your role in the band’s evolution? Are you sort of the John Entwistle-type, the ox on stage who keeps everything together? | [Laughs] Y’know, I think I’ve spent a lot of years trying to avoid the bass player-as-mediator role. I don’t know…I think me and Jeff really do have…I really value the harmony and the interplay we have, especially when he’s playing acoustic. Whenever I hear a bass player that’s not me playing on a track, which we’ve done from time to time, it just doesn’t sound like Wilco. There’s a certain identity to the band, and there’s a little me that’s part of that. I guess there’s something to be said for providing a certain stability to the situation from the beginning. |
We were all sorry, of course, to hear about Jay Bennett. I’m sure a lot of this is still fresh and there’s a lot to sort out. If you’re comfortable talking about it, how much contact had you had with him before his passing? Were you two close, and did you remain close after he left the band? [Editor’s Note: Jay Bennett was a multi-instrumentalist and former member of Wilco who is credited with giving the band’s earlier albums (from Being There through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) a more textured, atmospheric sound. He died in late May after taking an overdose of the painkiller fentanyl.] Yeah, actually, we were in contact for quite a while after he left the band. I think after I got married and had a child, our correspondence became a little more sporadic. But I think we had emailed within the last year…We’re all just absolutely deeply saddened, and…It has a surreal quality to it…I’ve felt it on this tour a bit, it’s like I’m in a dream or something…I don’t know. I don’t think that I’ve actually reconciled with it. |
As you’re on tour playing, what has it been like, or what do you think it might be like, to play some of the songs he worked on? | Im sure it’ll be mixed emotions, and a little bit of sadness, obviously. I always felt there was a certain amount of good we were doing to continue playing these songs. Obviously, they’re big songs in the Wilco canon, so it’s not like we wouldn’t play them or anything. But I always felt that we were playing these songs, y’know, and it was something he had a piece of. It was probably something good for him. We were helping to continue his work, in a way. |
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