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“We’ve tried to not be nostalgic as a band,” Jeff Tweedy instructed the viewers at New York’s United Palace Theatre on Saturday night time. Moments earlier, Wilco had completed performing their landmark 2002 album Yankee Resort Foxtrot in full, and aside from a short wave “whats up,” this was the primary he’d acknowledged us. Now that the final notes of “Reservations” had pale, the frontman was unfastened and gabby once more, filled with jokes and reward for the musicians, seemingly glad that the laborious a part of the night time was over.
The songs on Yankee Resort Foxtrot are among the many band’s most complicated compositions, and navigating them earlier than a dwell viewers should be taxing. However Tweedy’s seen reduction additionally summoned the album’s troubled historical past, which has entered into Wilco-fan mythology. Tweedy was struggling together with his habit to painkillers throughout recording classes, all whereas struggling debilitating migraines and feuding together with his musical companion Jay Bennett, whose personal habit was worsening. The album was then rejected by their label, Reprise. Some elements of that story resolve neatly into a cheerful ending—Nonesuch Information ultimately launched Yankee Resort Foxtrot, to common acclaim—whereas others don’t. Tweedy fired Bennett from the band following the album’s launch, and the 2 by no means reconciled earlier than Bennett overdosed on Fentanyl and died in 2009.
All of these reminiscences swirled across the stage on Saturday, as if the songs on Yankee Resort Foxtrot have been some form of hex designed to unlock them when performed so as. Tweedy waited till the album was over to pay tribute to Bennett, whose reminiscence inevitably haunts these songs. In the course of the efficiency, Yankee Resort Foxtrot nonetheless felt like the current—murky, high-stakes, ongoing. Watching the musicians onstage work to summon its sound, I discovered myself reflecting on what a tough one it’s to pin down—concurrently blurry and clear, meandering and exacting. Twenty years later, it nonetheless performs like a dream a rock album is having.
The primary performers to stroll onstage have been the Aizuri Quartet. Most attendees in all probability weren’t ready for a mini-chamber music opener, however the string quartet attacked their repertoire with such exact ferocity that they silenced the viewers, then elicited whoops and hollers. The set bore no apparent relation to both Wilco or Yankee Resort Foxtrot, however to Tweedy, that was a part of the purpose. He singled out the group twice through the encore, saying they represented “the world of creativity and sweetness” the band hoped to affix. You may learn in his face, obscured by glasses, beard, and wild hair, that he meant it.
