2AM Traffic

I've been listening to a lot of Wilco lately. Pretty well exclusively, even. I got a hold of three of their albums. Tonight I went out for a walk around Centretown in the snow, listening, listening...

I think part of my new fascination with Wilco is stripping away each layer of their production, trying to listen to their records on separate levels. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a record that places noise and ambient soundscapes upon fairly straight-ahead acoustic and pop rock numbers. The newer Sky Blue Sky record is one that lead singer Jeff Tweedy called an album of songs, pure and simple - a lot of guitar progressions and jamming. The other day I picked up A.M. and it's different than I thought it would be. I had heard so much about the influence of country music on Wilco's earlier stuff, but it's different from country music. Sure, they use slide guitar, but it's taken out of the context of the country music style and put into one that sound more like 90's alternative rock.

I've been trying to wrap my head around Jeff Tweedy. He's a huge punk rock fan, yet he fronts what a lot of people have called an alt. country band. He collaborates with a guy like Jim O'Rourke and has a predilection for noise and art rock, yet from what I've heard of the Wilco albums, they only scratch the surface of how different that style can get. I think part of the reason for that is Tweedy's love for writing lyrics. I think he regards himself as a poet who happens to be a songwriter.

I've always been a little bewildered by noise, but experimenting with Reason has turned me on to some of its possibilities. I'm still a much bigger fan of structure and melody, but I love the challenge of crafting something out of both. I'd really like to try something drastic with noise while still keeping an identifiable rhythm and lyrics as elements. I'm really interested in songs like "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and "Radio Cure", songs that shift in structure yet still hold together as beautiful pieces of music that start at A and end at Z.

The problem with the way I currently write songs in Reason is that I'm still married to writing overly segmented arrangements. I need to mix them up. I need to take a hammer to them and shatter them somehow, yet avoid the problem of them turning out too "weird". A lot of folks are into music that I find "weird". The music I make has to make sense to me. I don't want to write a song and feel like I didn't try hard to shape it appropriately afterward. I also need to spend more time on writing lyrics. Right now I'm writing words off the top of my head to gel with the songs. I'd like to try working on stuff that's more imagistically rich.

I started working on a new song today. These days listening to music feels more like a process of deconstruction to me. It's impressing me on a whole new level.