Yep. I don’t expect a ‘How to Design an Album Cover’ book from Tweedy anytime soon. If there is, I can’t imagine it selling.
These are the only ones I have that include Wilco but they are great albums especially the first. Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Avenue Label: Elektra – 62204-2 Format: CD, Album Country: US Released: 23 Jun 1998 Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Avenue Vol. II Label: Elektra – 62522-2 Format: CD, Album, Enhanced Country: US Released: 2000 In fact now that I think of it this is all I have by Billy Bragg also.
Thread guide Introduction and Uncle Tupelo Mar 1995 AM I Must Be High Casino Queen Box Full Of Letters Shouldn't Be Ashamed Pick Up The Change I Thought I Held You That's Not The Issue It's Just That Simple - live Should've Been In Love - live 1995 Passenger Side - live 1996 Dash 7 - live 2010 Blue Eyed Soul Too Far Apart Outtakes Oct 1996 Being There Misunderstood Far Far Away Monday Outtasite (outta mind) Forget The Flowers Red Eyed and Blue I Got You What's The World Got In Store Hotel Arizona Say You Miss Me Sunken Treasure Someday Soon Outta Mind (Outtasite) Someone Else's Song Kingpin (Was I) In Your Dreams Why Would You Wanna Live The Lonely 1 Dreamer In My Dreams Blasting Fonda (outtake?) Live 1996 - televised version Snow Job 97 June 1998 Mermaid Ave (with Billy Bragg) California Stars Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key Birds And Ships Hoodoo Voodoo She Came Along to Me At My Window Sad And Lonely Ingrid Bergman Christ For President I Guess I Planted One By One Eisler On The Go Hesitating Beauty Another Man's Done Gone The Unwelcome Guest March 1999 Summerteeth I Can't Stand It She's A Jar A Shot In The Arm We're Just Friends I'm Always In Love Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway (Again) Pieholden Suite How To Fight Lonliness Via Chicago ELT My Darling When You Wake Up Feeling Old Summer Teeth In A Future Age Candyfloss Interview 1999 May 2000 Mermaid Ave vol 2 Airline To Heaven My Flying Saucer Feed Of Man Hot Rod Hotel I Was Born Secret Of The Sea Stetson Kennedy Remembering the Mountain Bed Blood Of The Lamb Against Th' Law All You Fascists Joe Dimaggio Done It Again Meanest Man Black Wind Blowing Someday, Some Morning, Sometime Mermaid Ave vol 3 Loose Fur Laminated Cat Sept 2001 Yankee Hotel Foxtrot I Am Trying To Break Your Heart Kamera Radio Cure War On War Jesus Etc Ashes Of American Flags Heavy Metal Drummer I'm The Man Who Loves You - live b-side Pot Kettle Black Poor Places Reservations b-side The Good Part Blasting Fonda The Minus 5 2003 More Like The Moon ep Camera Handshake drugs Woodgrain A Magazine Called Sunset Bob Dylan's 49th Beard More Like The Moon June 2004 A Ghost Is Born (inc. Kicking Tv versions) At Least That's What You Said Hell Is Chrome Spiders Muzzle Of Bees Hummingbird Handshake Drugs Wishful thinking Company In My Back I'm A Wheel Theologians Less Than You Think The Late Greats Nov 2005 Kicking Television + some b-sides and oddities March 2006 Loose Fur Born Again In The USA May 2007 Sky Blue Sky Either Way You Are My Face Impossible Germany Sky Blue Sky Side With The Seeds Shake It Off Please Be Patient With Me Hate It Here Leave Me (Like You Found Me) Walken What Light On and On And On Extra Tracks Tweedy Interview The Sun Came Out - 7 Worlds Collide June 2009 Wilco (The Album ) Wilco (The Song) Deeper Down One Wing Bull Black Nova You And I You Never Know Country Disappeared Solitaire I'll Fight Sonny Feeling Everlasting Everything Dark Neon Sept 2001 The Whole Love Art Of Almost I Might Sunloathe Dawned On Me Black Moon Born Alone Open Mind Capitol City Standing O Rising Red Lung The Whole Love One Sunday Morning I Love My Label + extras Sometimes It Happens Sept 2014 Tweedy Sukierae Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood High As Hello World Away Diamond Light pt1 Wait For Love Low Key Pigeons Slow Love Nobody Dies Anymore I'll Sing It Flowering Desert Bell Honey Combed New Moon Down From Above Where My Love Fake Fur Coat Hazel I'll Never Know Aug 2015 Star Wars EKG More Random Name Generator You Satellite Taste The Ceiling Pickled Ginger Where Do I Begin Cold Slope King Of You Magnetized Sept 2016 Schmilco Normal American Kids If I Ever Was A Child Cry All Day Common Sense Nope Someone To Lose Happiness Quarters Locator Shrug And Destroy We Aren't The World Just Say Goodbye June 2017 Together At Last - Jeff Tweedy Dawned On Me Nov 2017 Mavis Staples - If All I Was Was Black Nov 2018 Warm - Jeff Tweedy Bombs Above Some Birds Don't Forget How Hard It Is For A Desert To Die Lets Go Rain From Far Away I Know What It's Like Having Been Is No Way to Be The Red Brick Warm How Will I Find You? Apr 19 Warmer - Jeff Tweedy Orphan
Thank you for these thread guides. Very much appreciated for those of us who lost the thread along the way as life intervened.
I never really got into Wilco, but I absolutely love "I Might." I heard it for the first time last year on my local AAA station and it caught my ear immediately. I later put it on a mix-CD and always crank it up when it comes on. "Catchy and dazzling" describes it perfectly. I also sampled The Whole Love and really got to like "Dawned On Me" and "Standing O" as well. Great stuff. Keep up the great work on this thread, @Parachute Woman!
After How Will I Find You?, Orphan almost rocks! An upbeat song! But about coming to terms with losing your parents… That's Jeff Tweedy for you, ladies and gentlemen! The song is incredibly direct. You can’t be more specific than that, you can’t be more universal than that. Everyone can relate, the ones that have lost their parents, the ones that are halfway there (like myself) and the ones that will get there eventually. I'll join @Parachute Woman in saying that the most profound lines is indeed “Let them love me again” or even more so the two lines combo "I will forgive them /Let them love me again". That's pretty heavy stuff that not many people would dare say in song, about the relationship one can have with loving parents: blaming them for so many things they did or didn’t do, but once they're gone, being ready to "forgive them" out of need for their unconditional love… Hard to acknowledge, hard to put it so eloquently in such few words… I also like the "She rests between what is far and near" and "He rests between how it is and how it seems" distinction. It's strong poetry and it's a wonderful attempt at showing that their "place" in his mind is not exactly the same, now that they're both gone. I really appreciate his effort to articulate that difference, with the same sensibility he put in describing his relationships with each one of them (and the rest of his family) in Please Tell My Brothers. For me, Orphan is the perfect WARMER opener, an apt proof that the LP is as important as WARM in its author mind and a direct continuation of it, sonically and thematically (the first sound on it is that fake steel guitar). But I can't help seeing it also as the deliberate sequel to that sublime Golden Smog little tune.
The album cover artwork just keeps getting better! Fiftysomething man just woken from an afternoon nap on a cloudy day? Dad, you feel asleep with your glasses on ... again! For a moment I thought Warmer just might have been a tribute album to soft-rock one-hit wonder Randy Vanwarmer. (Although I vastly prefer this reggae cover.) This album struck me as more of the same, which wasn't a bad thing. I can see from my Wilco playlist that the solo albums bat around .500 with me. Half the album just doesn't reach me, but I usually find the keeper tracks to be memorable. "Orphan" works for me. I rarely find myself on the same page with him emotionally, and I'm not here, despite having the same life experience. But one thing I know about parents dying is that people handle this in their own way. This track by NOFX is one of my go-to tracks for parental loss. I'm more in this camp, despite having had much better relations with my parents. It's a pretty raw time when it happens, and for a long time after.
WARMER is still very new to me, so my opinions are no more than impressions on the fly. Like @Fortuleo already said, it's a strong opener. It's telling us the theme of the record (at least I think it will be) and musically I enjoy the acoustic guitar strumming. When listening to the lyrics I feel I have to look in the mirror, asking myself "What about you ?". My expiriences were quite different. I think, it just confirms that it is very personal and different for each of us. "Let them love me again" is certainly very remarkable.
I have to agree with all the comments on the album cover. Both Warm and Warmer are horrible. I really don't get it. I also thought Sukierae had a terrible cover. I will say I do like most of the Wilco album covers, so I don't know why the solo albums are so bad. "Love is the King" has a better cover, but I still don't love it. "Orphan"- I am much less familiar with Warmer than Warm, but my first impressions of the album were higher than they initially were for Warm. I haven't really gone back to this album though and I couldn't really say what most of these songs sound like without listening to them again. This album will be the freshest to my ears out of every Tweedy/Wilco album we have discussed. I do believe that this should have been a double album like Sukierae. I remember Jeff saying something like he already put out a couple double albums and didn't want to release too many of them. He felt like he had used up all his rights to put out another one, which is one of the reasons this was split up. I have now listened to "Orphan" several times this morning and it's such and honest and open lyric about losing his parents. The music is very minimal and barely takes off, but I like this bare bones approach with these lyrics. I think this is a nice opening tune, but it doesn't completely knock me out. Kind of the same way I felt about "Bombs Above". Both are good songs, but there are better ones ahead. 3.5/5
I'm a little late with this, but I want to say that I really like "Let's Go Rain." I think it will eventually attain the stature of "The Mighty Quinn," even surpass it. It's a sing-along made for these times. (I'm assuming "The Mighty Quinn" has stature.) There's no reason Jeff's bed head can't be album art. Unfortunately (or not), I'll listen to Warmer in it's entirety today and probably not participate too much in the song-by. I feel I should reserve that work for the Wilco albums, or given where were are, album.
He thinks it is. Of course, he thinks it’s perfectly normal to look the same way when he goes to the record label corporate HQ (see Sam Jones film) to sign a contract!
Is the album really that bad ? It's not hurting my eyes. The Stones' Blue & Lonesome is my standard for an awful cover. Besides it was meant for an limited 5000 copies RSD, so maybe the resources for a tasteful design were also limited. In hindsight I prefer WARM/WARMER as a 1 CD or a 2LP release. I get tired of all those limited releases, special editions etc etc.
Well Warmer was a bit of a debacle when it was released. It was a vinyl only limited RSD release. Some fans lined up early in the morning and didn’t get it. Other fans had no access. Some got it but didn’t have a turntable. And of course flippers has it online by noon. I’m fortunate to live in a small city with good record stores and no RSD hype. I wandered into my local around 4pm grabbed my copy and made a needle drop that night. A lot of fans were locked out, though. At the time the RSD wording made it sound like this would be the only release. A couple months later, that all changed. The RSD release was indeed the only standalone release of Warmer, but Warm/Warmer was released as a deluxe LP set with a bonus track, and a double CD without the bonus track. Pretty much anyone who was buying this set already had Warm, so there was lots of grumpiness going around. That said, the album is great, as is the opening track. I could critique Orphan for being a little melodramatic - losing your parents in adulthood is hardly becoming little orphan Annie (and indeed there are many true orphans in this world today born into truly horrible circumstances!). But the metaphor is a powerful one that gets at a sad truth many of us have to face at some point in life. The music is a good introduction. It carries on the vibe of the first album. Starts with that faux steel. And it taps into that old Wilco (I hear echoes of Mountainbed) with a few new twists. And yeah, the cover sucks, but that’s part of the charm.
Initially I liked WARMER just as much as WARM, but I listened to it a couple of times in the car a few months ago and I didn't like it as much as I did when it came out. But I am looking forward to a careful track-by-track listen to see if feel differently now. It's funny - the cover doesn't bother me at all. I say it's funny because I am usually a very visual person, but I think you could give me a record in a plain white sleeve as long as the music is good. Orphan is a nice tune with some heartbreaking lyrics.
I just finished my preliminary skim through Warmer and am pretty disappointed. Maybe I’ll change my mind but so far this isn’t in the same league as Warm.
First time hearing Warmer and, wow, "Orphan" is an amazing song. Most of us will end up "orphans" at some point - I'm halfway there - and I've been told that it's the hardest event that most of us will ever have to deal with (absent the sudden loss of a partner or child). I find this song almost unbearably emotional. Tears are forming just hearing it for the first time. Just remarkable.
My impression of Warmer is that it's just a set of rough outtakes. The title, cover photo, and its release history do nothing to dissuade me from that idea. I'm not sure that it should be judged as anything more than that, but Jeff chose to put it out into the world, so I guess it's fair game. A lot of these sound like he's sort of making up the tune as he goes along, or just trying out his first ideas, while experimenting with some slide/fake pedal steel effects, and then left them as they were after deciding that the songs weren't making the cut. I guess "Orphan" sets expectations for the rest of the set, then. I like the bass line, and that's a nice, smooth transition into the second track. "I feel for her like a missing tooth" and "I watched until he was an empty room" are good poetry. But do I really get any strong feelings from listening? No, he sounds like he's in the same sedate daze that he's been in most of the time in recent years. Maybe that's how he expresses his grief--like a resigned exhaustion--but as far as I can tell, he could be singing about anything, because this is about how he sings nearly everything, lately. Rather than grief, it comes across as the sound of general malaise.
Already a split vote on Warmer, and we’re only one track in. The initial criticisms are all valid, and have challenged me to think about why I love this album so much. I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts as we work through it, but here are a few from where I stand after just one track: Jeff mumbles too much - we’ve heard him doing this for a few albums now. Frankly it just doesn’t bother me. But as I said way back when, there’s something about Spencer’s drumming that never sits 100% with me even at the best of times - chalk it up to personal taste. Jeff sings with a general malaise. I think this is very true. Given his past, his weight gain, and his general outlook on life in the last few albums, It’s safe to assume he’s medicated for anxiety/depression. I’m ok with the general malaise likely because I’m a bit of a “grey” person myself. Not deeply dark, but not sunshiny either. The songs sound like demos. I take the point, but don’t fully agree. The songs are short with basic arrangements, but I find that very effective. What I like about Warmer is that this even more personal and specific than Warm (which was already a pretty personal record). This now becomes a very direct record and I really appreciate that vibe.
Mumbling: This is a hyperbole, is it ? I can't take this literally. English isn't my native language, but I associate mumbling with Leonard Cohen. Anyway, I don't mind his singing style at all. General malaise: Possible, but I don't hear it and have my doubts. At least it doesn't seem like a lack of energy and inspiration. Demos: Sound quality - Don't agree. His records sounds as good as they've ever done: exquisite. Music - I agree for his solo albums. Instrumentally nothing is standing out, except for his guitar playing. Drums and bass are obligatory and functional. I'd like to hear more keyboards, John's fabulous bass and Glenn awesome drumming.
Interesting discussion. I got acquainted with Wilco around Kicking Television release, which piqued my interest due to Nels Cline's involvement, whom I had been already a fan of. I liked that live album a lot and quickly went back through their preceding studio albums. However when I caught them live a few years later on their Sky Blue Sky tour in 2007, I was very disappointed with their new "mainstream" direction. I expected Nels to bring even more avant-gardish edge to the band's music, but instead he got positioned as a virtuoso guitarist providing flashy solos instead of, well, "weird noises", which I had expected him to do and what Kicking Television had originally seemed to promise to me. Moreover, I didn't feel Nels' virtuoso playing in rootsy rock numbers served them well. Now having got acquainted with Wilco's earlier live recordings, through the deluxe re-editions of Being There and Summerteeth, I can hear how great (and experimental!) the band had been without Nels on stage and I can even better understand now where his detractors have been coming from. It was as if The Band had hired Jeff Beck to improve their music. Don't get me wrong, I am a bigger fan of Nels' solo career than ever been of Wilco, but I just think he is not as perfect fit as it is usually assumed. I mean, he may have proven great in helping to position Wilco in arena rock live circuit, where bombast virtuosity is always appreciated, but it was to the detriment of their original sound and style.
Family Ghost Discussing this song may be slightly difficult without breaking any forums rules. Suffice it to say, 'Family Ghost' is one of the most transparently political songs that Jeff has put on any of his projects. It's a little bit cryptic, but I definitely hear it as being a commentary on the environment Jeff grew up in and the kinds of people who populated his home town of Belleville. He's talked about this in multiple interviews: how he could put a face and a motivation (and even understand) those on the opposite side of the political spectrum from him, because he grew up surrounded by them. He's definitely critiquing them here, but with an intelligent eye. Again, not trying to break any forum rules here but this is what the song is about. Musically, it's easily one of the best on the album for me. This was definitely the hook that grabbed me most immediately upon first listen to Warmer. "I feel so American" paired with that guitar picking, plus the general 'riff' that goes through the song like the Doppler effect. It's a cool song and it definitely has a bit more 'fire' in it than a lot of the album, which is generally a pretty sad affair.
I like the solo acoustic version of 'Family Ghost' even better than the album version, actually: He's not mumbling at all here and I love the guitar playing. Some of his best acoustic fingering in awhile!
Yeah. This is the version I heard on the solo tour before Warm. I called it “I’m a dope” in my head and was surprised when it wasn’t on Warm. Its political message was clear even on first listen at a life show. The opening is another faux steel swell just like the opening to Orphan, but then goes in a different direction. I like the rockier feel of this number and that “Doppler” section reminds me of Golden Smog’s Radio King.
