The smokes are no longer free, and he's traversing the country in a rented Saturn. But if Jay Bennett is suffering ill effects for having departed Wilco nearly a year ago, the signs are buried deep beneath the gleeful layers of guitar and keyboards and all other studio toys within arm's reach on The Palace at 4 A.M. (Part 1). The album is the multi-instrumentalist's new recording with fellow Chicago musician Edward Burch (Kennett Brothers, the Viper and His Famous Orchestra), and was released on the same day as Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The albums sound as though they share a bloodline, as each record consists of a principle Bennett partnership at its core. But unlike the Wilco record, the birth of which has garnered as much attention as the progressive-sounding finished product, The Palace chooses to look through a prism of Sixties-flavored pop. Bennett and Burch work like scientists creating hybrids of that musical era with elements of folk ("Puzzle Heart"), country ("Like a Photograph") in a manner that isn't genre inclusion so much as it is genre fusion. The pair swap turns singing, picking and tickling the keys, in a way that doesn't draw attention to the seams, but rather the finished songs. Despite decidedly different singing voices, their tastes suggest they're music hounds from the same litter.

The two have spent the better part of the past month barnstorming the U.S., plugging the album with a series of loose duo performances that spotlight the bones of their meticulously assembled songs, while allowing the pair to cut up and yuk up with audiences who might have hopped on the bus at any of a number of stops, be it Bennett's first band, Titanic Love Affair, Wilco, or now, with their new collaboration.

Talking from a cell phone en route to a gig in Georgia, Bennett and Burch speak with the levity and enthusiasm of a group still wet behind the ears, despite having amassed a few decades of playing and performing between them. And why not? The Palace, a lower-profile release than Wilco's latest, managed to sell out it's initial printing. And the tantalizing "Part 1," speaks of an impending second edition of their partnership, as the outpouring of songs between the two proved too much to contain within the CD's time constraints. Next up, a few gigs with a full band, and then back to the Palace.

So how has the tour been treating you so far?

Jay Bennet: The first day of the tour was the biggest drive, from Chicago to Boston, and it's been pretty leisurely since then. Whatever, though, it's fun and I'm enjoying it.

Edward Burch: It's definitely been a blast. I told Jay the other night, I was falling asleep with a smile on my face.

Is there an nostalgic charm to doing the tour in a car, setting up your own gear and such?

JB: You know what, all the people out there touring in vans and cars, wishing they had a bus, are gonna hate me for saying this, but I love it. When you get a bus and an entourage, then your entourage hires an assistant entourage and the crew outnumbers the band. I guess the goal of all that is to get you to concentrate on the two hours a night where you're making music. But I have more than two hours of concentration a day in me. I'm one of those people who doesn't like to sit back and watch people do things when I could be doing them. That's why I love this business. I love every angle of it, even fixing the van. Ed and I work out lyrical ideas while we're driving and work on harmonies and sing along to records. And when it comes right down to it, setting up your gear ain't that hard.

Are you still able to get your cigarettes on the rider? Or is that now a thing of the past?

JB: We have no rider. We generally walk into the club and get a few drink tickets and I'll have coffee and water and Ed will have between one and thirteen beers [laughs]. If they choose to give us some chips and salsa that's fine.

That can get rough. They're like $7 a pack in New York.

JB: Yeah, it's getting tough. I just bought three cartons for $20 apiece.

I take it you're in the tobacco belt . . .

JB: Yeah, North Carolina, actually. Up in Chicago they're pushing $5. Really I can go up from a pack-a-day habit to three because they're half as much here. But the problem with cartons is it's easy for people to steal from you. They're in your backpack and you're not gonna miss one. And you go through 'em faster. It's not like, "Oh, I'm almost out, but this can last me a couple of hours." It's like, "Aw fuck, I got forty packs of cigarettes on me." [Laughs] And that's not good.

So the album seems to reflect a similar enthusiasm as this tour. Did work start right after Jay left Wilco or was there some downtime?

JB: A lot of these songs were really even pre- and during Wilco. This record pretty evenly represents seven years of writing. There are brand new songs and seven-year-old songs. We both continue to write like maniacs. I think we find ourselves in this position where in our minds we have three or four albums that are plotted out. And I'm not one of those people who really feels the need to put something out when it's just written. But there's a certain cleansing of the palate when you find songs out there.

EB: Little by little we just amassed a bunch of half finished songs. Last August when he decided to leave, he called me up and asked if I wanted to finish these for real. We just went through and found some songs we liked and put the finishing touches on them.

Was it easy to just pick the songs up where you left them?

EB: On one hand, we've lived with a lot of these songs for awhile. But "Talk to Me" was really recent. It was a demo of Jay's that I got a hold of and did some more stuff to it. It's all over the place, but the diving in and working on it, that part was easy. We got carried a way a bit, I think [laughs].

I was gonna ask, were there any instruments in the studio you didn't meddle with?

EB: Oooh yeah. "What haven't we used yet? Well this is lying around . . .," and then Jay hops over on the orchestra bells. I helped Jay load the orchestra bells in when he bought them. He said, "Look what I just got! We gotta find something to do with them." One of my favorite parts is the orchestra bells doing this little lick on "Talk to Me," that just cracks me up. Right next to the banjo.

JB: To me, there are bands that treat the studio as a place to just record their songs. And I have treated the studio that way in the past, but it's also a musical instrument itself that can be played. It's one big instrument. And I don't think every recording we ever do will be like that. I'm sure we'll do some bare stripped down stuff on the next one.

What are the plans for Part 2?

EB: There will definitely be more on the way. Probably culling from a lot of the same body of material. If we write some other things in the meantime, we'll throw those on. We just wanted to get something out and it was too daunting to finish sixty songs and put out a triple record. We had threatened to do that at one point [laughs], but decided to let people have it in installments instead. They'd be like, "Who do you think you are?" We actually thought about doing one record that was a pop record, one record that was a ballad record, but instead we just decided to pull some of all of those onto one.

JB: I'd be happy to work on it every free day we have. I guess there is the commercial aspect where you don't want to overlap it a lot. Bob from Undertow [their label] is here in the car with us and he's begging us not to put it out as soon as we want to. I wouldn't mind a little more overlap than is the industry standard. An album every two years doesn't work for me, 'cause that's like writing a song every six weeks or something. It's the old watching paint dry thing.

So Jay, do you still keep something of a father's eye on the new Wilco record or do you feel you've cut it loose?

JB: I think I probably detached myself from it in the same way I detach myself from any Wilco record. I began the record with my best intentions and doing my best work and I saw the record through and then I detached. It's still very much my swan song with them, and my presence is felt very much, I think. I really hate to quote what friends of mine have said in the press. But I've read where [Wilco bassist] John Stirratt said I wasn't on this record as much as Summerteeth, to which my response was, well, that'd be impossible. But I've actually got more songs on this record than any other Wilco record. I'm really proud of the songs I wrote and the way it turned out.

And it doesn't sound like you've had any regrets with the decision to leave.

JB: No, but there is a sense in which it was abandoned like all other records, you just hope you're abandoning it at the right place and time, which I think I did. But I'm enjoying this. Edward and I are like minded, perhaps dangerously like minded. But this was the foot that we decided to put forward. And without sounding cocky, it is just scratching the surface. And that's a different feeling from making a Wilco record. When you make a Wilco record, for some reason, the vibe is always in the air that this just has to be our masterpiece. I wouldn't make the claim that every day in the studio we were thinking that, but there were times in the studio when the history of the band and the history of the evolution of the band's sound weighed heavy.

And it reached a breaking point on "Yankee Hotel"?

JB: Yeah. I think we had emotional expectations for the way that record should turn out and what sort of impact it should have. But it was definitely a search and destroy mission. It was a guerilla record. We came at it out of the woods at every possible angle and worked on it for a long, long time. And in fact, I've seen in all sorts of articles about the record and that record was really worked on for a solid year and a half off and on. But good chunks of the early sessions survived. What you hear as a final product is a stopping point for this living, breathing thing. And it doesn't cease to live and breathe. Its evolution was halted and you have to do that or you'll never get the record out. But it's been really cool to get out there and see the reactions. We did a Tower in-store and I'm signing my record, and it's this thing I did with my best friend. And someone comes up with a Wilco record for me to sign, and I'll go, "Oh, that one's pretty special too." That one's a little older in my mind and it's a collaboration with a group of people I'm no longer collaborating with. So it's not as near to my heart. But it's like, "Of course I'm signing this one."

ANDREW DANSBY
(May 28, 2002)