Speaking of music historians and sounds of the past, Greg Kot interviews Jeff Tweedy about the new Wilco album (Amazon just emailed me that I should expect my copy by May 16th).
Chicago Tribune | Wilco's intimate “Sky Blue Sky”:
... The common ground for the current incarnation of the band — a six-piece lineup that includes founding bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and guitarist Nels Cline — is the music made between 1966 and 1974, Tweedy says. The band even recorded the music on a 2-inch reel-to-reel tape machine instead of computers, which is practically unheard of in today’s production world. It requires a band to essentially record complete takes of a song rather than overdub and edit parts at will.
Much about the album, from the way it was recorded to the artwork, evokes the casual community of recordings such as “The Basement Tapes,” an unvarnished document of the music the Band and Bob Dylan made during the late ’60s in the basement of Big Pink, a house in Woodstock, N.Y. They share a similar spirit: friends gathered in a room, making music for music’s sake, recording all the instruments and voices while playing together.
(we've discussed Tweedy's obsession with Quantegy reel-to-reel tape previously)
