Wilco has conversations with their audiences – seeing them live is like catching up with old friends. Sometimes there’s new stuff going on in their lives, sometimes not. But even if things feel slightly familiar, it’s still great getting to hang out with them. I’ve been following the band since I first heard Being There and then went backward (Uncle Tupelo) from there. I’ve kept pace with their subsequent releases and found them to be an ever-evolving band that finds new ways to acclimate themselves to their own shifting creativities. They’ve been one of the archetypal models for alt-country for so long that they’ve become a self-sustaining institution, a group that sets the tone for the genre, veering between classic sounds and more experimental impulses from album to album.
On a rainy night in Chattanooga, the band offered a heady mixture of old and new, blending casual acoustic remembrances with ecstatic freakouts. It had been 25 years since I last saw Wilco in concert, shaking the walls at a venue called The Bay in Chattanooga back in 1999, and I was eager to reignite the dialogue between us. There was so much to cover, so much to consider, and I didn’t want to waste a minute of my time with them.
But that talk would have to wait for just a bit as Waxahatchee took the stage. Katie Crutchfield led her band, which included Spencer Tweedy on drums, through a rollicking set of songs that spoke to her own evolution as a musician, focusing mostly on the contours of her 2024 album, Tigers Blood. Opening with “3 Sisters”, she sang as though music could heal the wounds of everyone in the room. And, who knows, maybe it did to some degree: part exorcism, part revival, and all directed at the broken pieces of our hearts. The band was tight but allowed Crutchfield to wander and soar as she delivered these songs as sacraments, offerings to communal healing and camaraderie.
She touched upon Tigers Blood further with tracks like “Crowbar”, “The Wolves”, “Evil Spawn”, and a hypnotic version of “Right Back to It”. She kept rising to meet each new note, and we ascended with her. Recent single “Mud” was a joy, a tumbling countrified blur of insight and wistful remembrance. Saint Cloud was represented by “Can’t Do Much”, “Fire”, and “Lilacs”, the latter being a particular highlight of the evening. She even managed to touch on her work with Jess Williamson as Plains, sharing a lovely rendering of “Problem with It” that made me remember why I fell in love with that record in the first place. Her set was longer than I expected but shorter than I wanted, and the air seemed especially empty as she and band left the stage.
But that emptiness soon turned to joy as Wilco took the stage. And it quickly became clear that this wasn’t some retread of past glories – they were ready to explore different facets of their work and expand them into new avenues of rhythmic experimentalism. And, oh yeah, it was fucking loud. Opening with “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” from A Ghost is Born was ballsy, being a record that for quite a while had been related to B or C level status among diehards and casual fans alike, but which has received some measure of retroactive reconsideration in recent years. They followed it up with “Wishful Thinking”, another AGIB track that left no doubt that they weren’t necessarily going the easy route and were intent on making a statement about the elasticity of their past and the ways in which the future might allow them to adapt those histories to serve new purposes.
Drawing almost equally from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born, Cruel Country, and Sky Blue Sky, with a few very brief detours through other records, they made a case that their method of reinventing themselves through the lens of their rural genealogies has given them a unique perspective on both the genre they helped to shape and the ways in which it has influenced countless musicians over the last 30 years. Whether it was guitarist Nels Cline’s intense and extended dissonance and distortion on “Impossible Germany” or Tweedy’s casual cheerfulness on “Hummingbird”, the stage was a laboratory, a rehearsal space, a hall of memories.
Being Mother’s Day, Tweedy took time to celebrate the mothers in attendance and then took time to speak about his own mother before launching into “I Am My Mother”. “I miss mine,” he said simply. He recalled a time when his family took a trip to Florida when he was younger, passing through Chattanooga on their way to the beach. He said that he didn’t recall anything of Florida but remembered Chattanooga, specifically Lookout Mountain. It was an icebreaker, and a good one and necessary as the crowd took some time to get on the band’s wavelength. Summerteeth highlight “Via Chicago” was paired with “Annihilation”, a jangling romp from their recent Hot Sun Cool Shroud EP.
And while I might have preferred more representation from Being There (I’m looking at you “Misunderstood” and “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”, I can’t complain about their digging deeper into some albums that might not always get the appropriate attention. “Either Way” and “Side with the Seeds” from Sky Blue Sky were remarkable distillations of that album’s aesthetic, mixing alt-country aphorisms with laidback melodies, as the band went about discovering the connective tissue between the past and the present. With “War on War”, “Heavy Metal Drummer”, “Jesus, Etc.”, “I’m the Man Who Loves You”, and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”, they cemented the importance of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on nearly all aspects of folk, country, and indie rock.
The evening ended as the last notes of “I’m the Man Who Loves You” faded away. The stage was deserted. But we know it wasn’t actually over. After a bit of cheering and clapping, the band retook the stage and started their encore with “California Stars”, a concert staple and one that I was waiting to hear. On its heels came the country roll of “Falling Apart (Right Now)” and the bluesy stomp of “Walken”. They closed out the evening with “I Got You (At the End of the Century)”, a song that tied everything together: the past and the present, the aesthetic swings that have characterized their history, our shared affection for the places they’ve taken us. Time passes and things change. We hold on to what we can and release the rest to drift away into the darkness, hoping that one day that it might return to us. Our conversation ended. I sucked the rainy evening air into my lungs. And I was glad to have caught up with some old friends.
