Wilco Set New Touring Lineup

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Wilco have enlisted keyboardist/guitarist Pat Sansone, who plays with Wilco bassist John Stirratt in the Autumn Defense, to fill in for multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach, who departed the group last month. Sansone and guitarist Neels Cline will be part of the touring face of Wilco when the group hits the road next month for a eight-date run of North American shows.

As it now stands, Wilco's touring lineup will feature Sansone, Cline and Stirratt along with frontman Jeff Tweedy, drummer Glenn Kotche and keyboardist/laptop twiddler Mikael Jorgensen. The core of Tweedy, Stirratt, Kotche, Jorgensen and Bach was responsible for recording Wilco's fifth album, A Ghost Is Born, due June 8th.

The new set continues in the vein of 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, straddling experimental rock and traditional pop. Wilco's stylistic shiftiness echoes that of Neil Young, whose early Crazy Horse era is suggested on the opener "At Least That's What You Said." The twelve-song set also includes a pair of longer excursions, the eleven-minute "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," which grooves from an instrumental pattern into something songish and the fifteen-minute workout "Less Than You Think," which takes the opposite tact, moving from a quiet piano ballad into droning territory.

The set was produced by Wilco with Jim O'Rourke, who engineered Foxtrot.

Wilco's schedule currently runs through a May 1st appearance at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, with a June 11th Bonnaroo appearance also planned.

Wilco tour dates:

4/21: Columbia, MO, Blue Note
4/23: New Orleans, Orpheum
4/24-25: Austin, Stubb's
4/27: Santa Fe, NM, Lensic Theater
4/28: Flagstaff, AZ, Orpheum
4/29: Tucson, AZ, Rialto Theater
5/1: Indio, CA, Coachella Festival
6/11: Manchester, TN, Bonnaroo Festival

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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