WILCO MAKE THE CHANGE WE NEED
Cool, copacetic new producer Cate Le Bon helps one of America’s greatest bands keep it fresh
Jeff tweedy writes so well about his own music-making, there sometimes seems little worth adding: See his bestselling books (the annotated playlist World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music is due November) and his Starship Casual Substack (the post from July 4 on Paul Simon’s “America” was especially good). But outside perspective can be useful — as Cousin proves. It’s the first Wilco set since 2007 to use an outside producer, and it shows — in the best possible way.
The producer is Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, who clicked with the band at Solid Festival, Wilco’s biennial Massachusetts music-and-art kegger. She does weird well, because her oddball pop always feels rooted in the heart. Tweedy’s a plainspoken dude whose avant-garde streak, despite rangy sidemen like Glenn Kotche and Nels Cline, has occasionally come off more aspirational than constitutional. So Le Bon and Tweedy are a good match, and maybe because we’re all swimming in strangeness lately, even Cousin’s more abstract fusions feel utterly natural.
Le Bon’s touch is understated. Given her wickedly Nico-esque 2019 cover of Wilco’s “Company in My Back,” one might wish her vocals were more prominent. But her musicianship shadows the curveball melodies and clipped watchmaker beats scattered through Cousin — a fairly sharp pivot from the flashback country-rock Americana of last year’s excellent Cruel Country, more often conjuring angular Anglo post-punk and old-school Canterbury Scene prog-rock. “A Bowl and a Pudding” is a dubby Nick Drake fever dream; “Pittsburgh” suggests the Incredible String Band tripping in a steel mill.
But part of Wilco’s magic is their mutability (“They can be anything,” Le Bon noted admiringly), and how artfully it always cleaves to Tweedy’s narrative voice, one of the most companionable in modern song, even when he’s channeling flawed characters, which he frequently is. “I love to take my meds/Like my doctor said,” he sings on “Levee,” a sorta-kinda love song about a relationship that might or might not represent salvation. “Evicted” is an unusually celebratory song about owning your fuck-ups. “Ten Dead” adds his voice to a haunting recent run of mass-shooting meditations. And “Meant to Be,” the set closer, is a feint that suggests a triumphal love song until you sense the singer’s earnestness might be one-sided. When he sings the words “I still believe you’re the only one” near the end, the key word hangs like the “Believe” sign above Ted Lasso’s locker-room doorway. It’s no assurance of anything, but it’s a force — like Wilco’s entire oeuvre, really — to keep us hopeful.