Wilco endures despite label troubles

Sacks & Co. Wilco is one of ATP’s Saturday night
headliners.

By Andrew Lee
Daily Bruin Contributor

As Wilco embarks on a new tour that includes a stop at UCLA on
Saturday, the band will undoubtedly see fans singing along to every
song on its new album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” slated
for release April 23. That’s because, due to an unprecedented
set of circumstances (even in today’s digital age) many fans
have had the album for over eight months.

Wilco’s long-standing relationship with Reprise Records
was abruptly cut off last June when reps approached the band and
told them that wholesale changes needed to be made to “Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot,” scheduled for release the next month. The
band was faced with one of two decisions: re-enter the studio to
make the record more radio-friendly, or buy back the rights to the
album and find another label to call home. Now, $50,000 and one
seemingly endless wait later, the band is signed on to Nonesuch
Records, and its highly anticipated album finally ready for an
official release.

“I just think it came down to (Reprise) feeling that they
couldn’t sell it,” said bassist John Stirratt in a
phone interview. “It was actually a really small collection
of people that really passed on the record, but our allies
weren’t in the position to really approve it. I think it was
more of a “˜what are we going to do with this album’
kind of reaction. I can’t really say anything bad about them,
though, because they did let us go, and that’s the most
important thing.”

If anything, the label struggles garnered Wilco an abundance of
media attention. Their case was a reminder of the deteriorating
state of label-artist relationships cropping up throughout the
industry. Prior to the conflict Wilco had released all three of its
previous albums with Reprise.

To compound the band’s struggles, multi-instrumentalist
and co-songwriter Jay Bennett and drummer Ken Coomer left the band
shortly thereafter.

“It was the first time I’ve ever really felt
stress,” Stirratt recalls. “In this business
we’re all the artistic type, and I think we gravitated toward
this profession in order to avoid the stressful day-in-day-out
situation, but it was stressful. But the personnel thing was more
stressful than anything else. I always felt the label situation was
going to be OK.”

Regardless of its problems with Reprise, Wilco really did have
little reason to worry ““ immediately after news of the split
reached the public, a reported 30 labels lined up for the chance to
woo the band. But matters got even more complex when the band heard
reports of the album leaking onto the Internet at a time when the
band just started thinking about a new label contract.

“I think it was an inter-company leak,” Stirratt
said. “That’s what I gather from it. Initially when we
first saw it get out, it was directly after we had delivered the CD
to Reprise. That’s when we first started seeing it happen. We
did print some other press copies once the cat was out of the bag,
but that was way down the line.”

Instead of conjuring the inner Metallica and accosting their
fans, the band decided to start streaming the entire album from
their Web site, before they had even found a new label.

“It got to the point where it was kind of an insider thing
to have the record, where you had to know the right person,”
Stirratt said. “That’s the reason why we streamed it,
to give everyone a shot to at least hear it.”

Everyone did hear it, and at the end of 2001 many critics gave
the album a mention on end-of-the-year lists. “Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot” even managed to make a dent on the Village
Voice’s annual Pazz and Jop poll.

Preceding the recording sessions that would produce
Wilco’s latest album, singer Jeff Tweedy reportedly immersed
himself in listening to a 4-CD set called “The Conet
Project,” a compilation of sounds intercepted from mysterious
short-wave radio stations.

The stations feature odd sounds and processed voices reciting
numbers and words of code.

The enigmatic sounds of these stations worked their way into
Wilco’s latest effort, which couples the band’s
traditionally well-crafted rock songs with bursts of feedback,
static and alarms. In fact, “The Conet Project” is the
source of the sample at the end of Wilco’s “Poor
Places,” which features a woman repeatedly intoning the words
“yankee hotel foxtrot.”

But the band’s experimental explorations did little for
Reprise.

“I don’t know how these guys listen to music,”
Stirratt said. “I just picture them in convertibles in
Hollywood trying to get past (the first track) “˜I am Trying
to Break Your Heart,’ but unsuccessfully. That’s my
idea of what went on.”

Now, with the “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” problems
resolved, the band is already looking to the future and new
projects. A collaboration with Seattle’s pop-rock band The
Minus 5 is already recorded and scheduled for release in July. The
band has also reentered the studio and recorded eight new songs,
with plans to continue recording in late June after a slew of tour
dates in North America and a trip to Europe in May.

“By December we had pretty much shaken everything
off,” Stirratt said. “We feel optimistic and it really
feels fresh. It feels like the beginning of the band,
really.”