Wilco, The Cactus Blossoms

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Annabel Mehran

Wilco in the woods.

Wilco

There has always been country in Wilco, sometimes fairly direct but more often woven into the fabric of the band's coat of many colors. On their 12th studio album, Cruel Country, they didn't set out to make a country record but that's how they are describing this double-album's worth of new songs soaked in our current socio-political dysfunction and recorded mostly live in the band's rehearsal/recording studio. Whatever genre the listener finds the record to be, it would be hard to deny Cruel Country is the sound of a band reinvigorated by being able to be back in the same space creating music. With The Cactus Blossoms.

$52.50.

media release: Cruel Country Bio

by Jeff Tweedy  

Wilco goes Country! Is that something people still say? Do people still “go” Country? I mean, I’m saying it, but I doubt it’s something a lot of other people would say, especially about a Wilco album. Because I think there’s been an assumption over the years that Wilco is some sort of Country band. To be specific, early on, coming out of Uncle Tupelo, that really felt like a widely-held belief. And, sure, there!s a lot of evidence to support that way of thinking about our band, because there have been elements of Country music in everything we’ve ever done. But to be honest, we’ve never been particularly comfortable with accepting that definition of the music we make. With this album though, I’ll tell you what, Wilco is digging in and calling it Country. Our Country. Cruel Country. Country music that sounds like us to our ears. In the past, it was always valuable and liberating for us to steer clear of the “Country” moniker. It helped us grow and keep our minds open to inspiration from near and far. But now, having been around the block a few times, we’re finding it exhilarating to free ourselves within the form, and embrace the simple limitation of calling the music we’re making Country.  

How did we get here? The story of this record starts in a way that I’m sure is very familiar to bands of all shapes and sizes in this semi-post-pandemic world. Simply put, having something so elemental to how we’ve lived most of our lives taken away for so long made the plain old pleasure of sitting in a room together and making music feel urgent. When we were finally able to make that happen at the beginning of this year—2022—we began the way we always do, experimenting with different types of songs and styles hoping to discover something new and inspiring. We were looking for the record we didn’t know we could make, the record that would surprise us. But looking for novel shapes while sitting smack-dab in the middle of the giant disorienting and unfamiliar shape that is our world at the moment felt untethered and futile. So Country and Folk songs started happening. Loads of them. The tried-and-true became the ground on which to project the world’s hallucinations. “What is happening?“ “I don’t know. Let’s see if it makes more sense sung to a waltz.” With six people playing together at once, these were also the songs easiest to latch onto quickly. Which helped us all focus the urgency we were feeling into new songs to sing.

The whole record is comprised, almost entirely, of live takes, with just a handful of overdubs. Everyone in the room together with a leaky drum booth and no baffles. It!s a really great way to make a record. But due to artistic curiosity and no small shortage of challenging logistics, it’s an approach we haven!t used in years—maybe not since Sky Blue Sky. It’s a style of recording that forces a band to surrender control and learn to trust each other, along with each others’ imperfections, musical and otherwise. With no “one” person in charge, the goal can be vague. But a certain type of faith emerges. A belief that we’re all heading toward the same destination, and we either get there together or not at all. It’s messy. Like democracy. But when it’s working the way it’s supposed to, it feels like gathering around some wild collective instrument, one that requires six sets of hands to play. An instrument that forces one to communicate wordlessly and sprout deep tangles of roots, like an old forest.  

Once I started listening back to what we had done—as Cruel Country began to take its shape as a double record—a narrative began to emerge. Our little democracy had apparently been moved to semi-consciously spit out a picture of our currently- addled democracy. In spite of ourselves, and all of our concerns and efforts to distract, we had made an “American music” album about “America.” And if you listen closely I do believe there is a rough chronological outline of how we got here, to the present-day USA, that is. I see it in how the album starts with the images of migration contained in early songs like"#I Am My Mother”, ‘Hints”, and "Empty Condor”. And I see it in how the record winds down with “The Plains”, where the notion of going anywhere at all, much less exploring for greener pastures, has fallen on hard times. It isn’t always direct and easy to spot, but there are flashes of clarity. It’s all mixed up and mixed in, the way my personal feelings about America are often woven with all of our deep collective myths. Simply put, people come and problems emerge. Worlds collide. It’s beautiful. And cruel. The specifics of an American identity begin to blur for me as the record moves toward the light and opens itself up to more cosmic solutions—coping with fear, without belonging to any nation or group other than humanity itself. Which leads us to death. There’s death...quite a bit of it actually. Maybe you’ve come to expect that from my songs. If you haven’t, you should, because I’ve given up entirely at resisting the topic... but here, let’s at least put it in the context of a dying empire. As we’ve done our best to embrace the stress and joy of not knowing what happens next. What does it all mean? What are the connections? How does it relate to itself? How does it relate to ME? When a record asks me those questions, I can listen forever.  

More than any other genre, Country music, to me, a white kid from middle-class middle America, has always been the ideal place to comment on what most troubles my mind—which for more than a little while now has been the country where I was born, these United States. And because it is the country I love, and because it!s Country music that I love, I feel a responsibility to investigate their mirrored problematic natures. I believe it!s important to challenge our affections for things that are flawed. I feel like these defining parts of who we are demand introspection. No one should need to ask. We should feel compelled to contemplate. To ask if there are ways to fix things, if there are things that just need to be accepted. And maybe to see if we can stop trying to figure out how to separate two things that can!t be separated. Country music is simply designed to aim squarely at the low-hanging fruit of the truth. If someone can sing it, and it’s given a voice... well, then it becomes very hard not to see. We’re looking at it. It’s a cruel country, and it’s also beautiful. Love it or leave it. Or if you can’t love it, maybe you’ve already left.