Wilco has often been characterized by their expansive and eclectic sounds, bouncing from heavy guitar sounds that incite and often parallel the dark and blurred emotions that their songs emit to soft melodic incantations like “Please Be Patient With Me” and “Reservations,” off their albums Sky Blue Sky and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot respectively. Their new album, The Whole Love, has no shortage of classic Wilco diversity, but with varied sounds comes intimate and heartbreaking lyrics and Tweedy’s tightened, focused song writing reverberates in the consciousness of the listener. This album lends itself to multiple listens due to the sustained tension between music and lyric; often, because of the complexity of sounds, one may get easily lost in the musical moment, or aura. The upbeat and musically complex song—a song with dominating guitar sounds and the occasional background percussion—“I Might” musically masks the dark, morbid lyrics, “It’s alright/ You won’t set the kids on fire / Oh, but I might.” Tweedy’s warning sets a tone of unhinged possibility, a journey through a series of potentials and unknowns. Following the hyper, fast-paced “I Might,” the album progresses into a dreamy, pseudo-psychedelic escape: “Sunloathe.”
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“Sunloathe” functions as an inverse of Harrison’s Beatles song, “Here Comes the Sun.” The song demonstrates and typifies the tension between music and lyrics found throughout the album. Musically, the song begins as if in the middle of a trance or meditation, and echoes Romantic sublimity, drunk on Keats’ “hemlock” or Coleridge’s opium. However, the soothing Romantic vision of natural peace and solemnity immediately gets turned upside down by Tweedy’s opening lines, “I loathe the sun.” The song’s title functions as an antithesis to Harrison’s optimistic classic, but “Sunloathe” does feel like a fab-four production. With a haunting background melody not unlike another Abbey Road song, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy,) Wilco has perfected reliance on The Beatles through respectful imitation. Despite the gloomy and, at times, morbid sentiment of “I Might” and “Sunloathe,” there are also moments of indulgent love and embracive romantic wooing in Tweedy’s lyrics.
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Combining experimental, loud art-rock with loveable helplessness, Tweedy melds music and lyrics beautifully in “Dawned On Me.” The occasional whistle together with paced, catchy rhythms and chorus create an untraditional, but inspiring love song. The song opens with a series of juxtapositions setting up a sense of disillusionment and vulnerability: “I’ve been young, I’ve been old / I’ve been high and consoled…I’ve been lost, I’ve been found / I’ve been taken by the sound, of my own voice / And the voices in my head…” Tweedy expounds on love beyond his control in the chorus, “I can’t help it if I fall in love with you again…” A sense of uncontrollable desire parallels the accompanying music, wild and free from constraint. The song clearly demonstrates Wilco’s ability to synthesize sounds together with powerful, relevant lyrics. A less frantic love song emerges in “Open Mind,” a lover’s plea for intellectual and perhaps spiritual access, successfully employing metaphor and striking imagery of the mind. A laid-back groove flowered with Tweedy’s fresh and trimmed lyrics, the song works because of its intimacy and immediacy, echoing sentiments of “carpe diem,” without the oft-implied sexual implications. “Open Mind” employs literary devices like pun (“I would throw myself under the wheels of any train of thought”) and metaphor (“Running of the rails I’ll sail you through the roadways / Of your brain,” “I could base my whole existence / Upon the cherry strings of your cold hair”) to reach towards desire; however, this desire manifests itself as platonic and playful. Tweedy’s conscious mixture of catchy, happy musical riffs with pained solace and sadness finds its peak in “Born Alone.”
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A pure Rock ‘n’ Roll song with electrifying guitar riffs, “Born Alone,” becomes the epitome of tension found throughout the record and acts as a prelude to the album’s final song, a twelve minute epic, “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend.)” This song beautifully illustrates Tweedy’s control over his lyricism despite the often eccentric and varied musical arrangements. Tweedy’s writing throughout the album is concentrated, compact and direct. “Born Alone,” along with the album’s closing song, are the best two examples. Raw emotion dominates the song with unforgettable lines such as, “sadness is my luxury,” and the real tour de force of the song, its chorus: “I was born to die alone.” Tweedy pours these words out with an impulsive excitement like they have been brooding in his depths. In “Born Alone” Tweedy confronts isolation and sadness willingly and passionately, backed by screaming guitars and forceful percussion. The tension broods throughout the song and with references to the “gospel” and “fate,” with biblical inspired lines—“my eyes have seen the fury”—one has no choice but to be taken aback by such dichotomies and yet immersion. The closing song of The Whole Love attempts to reconcile the problems and issues that have arisen throughout the album, but that does not necessarily mean an ultimate conclusion is drawn or salvation is found.
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The album’s closing song, “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” is a sprawling epic that addresses many sentiments of the album: love, loss, and faith. The twelve-minute song emerges from the ashes of pain and melancholy, and the listener becomes enveloped by the reality that this is where the album has been taking them all along. “One Sunday Morning” epitomizes the efforts on this album and becomes the culmination of a musical journey towards poignant and perhaps cathartic honesty and reflection. Musically repetitious, the same riffs cyclically provide structure, each word sinks into the listener’s consciousness. The last manifestation of tension between music and lyrics, the song brilliantly displays universal struggles; furthermore, the soothing musical repetition becomes undermined by Tweedy’s sadness, a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that continue to haunt with each successive listen. The song, a microcosm of the album’s diverse concerns, provides ample opportunity for explication. Held together by ruminations on a dead father, the song explores matters of faith, truth and familial relations. The tension of the album seen on the macro level transitions to the micro, as the song displays the struggle between opposing viewpoints but also the process of mourning a deceased loved one. Tweedy, as a songwriter, here is at his best. Implicit allusion and vivid imagery flow through the rivers of loss, pain and conflict. Melancholic lines such as, “I fell in love with the burden / holding me down,” are in contrast with yearning, “I am cold for my father / Frozen underground.” There are also prodigal overtones, “one son is gone,” however without redemption and reunion. Tweedy’s lines powerfully resonate in the listener’s mind, as he or she becomes equally consumed in life’s duality, mysteries and unanswered questions.
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The pain expressed in the song stems from a lack of answers and absolutes; the dead father judges the speaker (“My father said what I had become / No one should be”) but the son still yearns for authority and rigor, “Bless my mind, I miss / Being told how to live.” The lines of the song, “Outside I looked lived in / Like bones in a shrine,” demonstrate the effect of tension and human struggle, creating an image removed from the flesh and objectification of the body, a direct result of mortality. The song, and thus the album itself, fails to be redeemed by faith or religion (“It’s your God I don’t believe in / No your Bible can’t be true”) and instead the album expresses a redemption that stems from creativity, diversity and duality. These elements of humanity carefully crafted and compounded by Tweedy and Wilco, create an infinitely experimental and relevant album, a testament of the band’s unique ability to remain innovative, and also a testament to their continued ability to stretch the boundaries of contemporary music while also expanding their musical impact and importance.
