Wilco (the album) is released today. Though there's a good chance that if you know who Wilco is you've been listening to it for weeks either streaming on wilcoworld.net or via NPR's blessed first listen dealio. CLICK HERE
Tweedy also began to rethink the way he approached lyrics, questioning his insistence on writing in the conversational voice. He relaxed his rule against committing lyrics to paper: If you couldn’t remember it, it wasn’t worth singing in the first place. “I used to want to write songs that anybody could sing, but then I started to think it was OK to write songs that only sound right when I sing them,” says Tweedy.
He began to realize mysterious things happened in the spaces between words, and that when you arranged them in certain ways, you could create magnetic fields of deep suggestiveness. He experimented with collage and cut-up techniques, snipping words out of newspapers and magazines, tossing them in a hat and drawing them randomly to see what sentences they made. He would write a page of lyrics, then switch all the nouns and verbs. To break up the boredom on the road, Wilco and crew would participate in an old surrealist word game called cadavre exquis(“exquisite corpse”). A typewriter would be set up in the back of the bus, and whenever someone felt like it, he could go back and type a sentence. The one rule: You could only see the sentence typed by the person before you; all the rest were kept covered. Some of this accidental poetry would make it into songs, such as the line “Please beware, the quiet front yard,” fromSummerteeth’s “She’s A Jar.”
