Wilco Night! 🕺

The Wilco show I was at last night was my introduction to Dad Rock; I wore shorts, paid extra for an aisle seat (seat!!!) with leg room, and was thrilled to slip out before the final encore and get a jump start on beating the traffic. I'd say it was as much Dad as rock, and I had a great time.

Wilco's always been perfectly fine for me, I like some songs and Tweedy & I probably share 90% of the same musical DNA from our youths, but it really hit home last night for me how much they're the John Updike of music; their songs always have interesting parts just like Updike can rip off a great sentence but by the end of the song they haven't really built into anything, just like by the end of the paragraph you have no idea what the hell Updike is saying, and you no longer care. It's almost like they go thru musical exercises: here's part A, here's Part B and C and D, now we're gonna sing the chorus and that's the song. And I've never seen a band with so many songs that stop & start so many times. Meanwhile, for a band based around a singer/songwriter in Tweedy, there's a loooooooooooooooooooooooot of "guitar players hypnotized by their own feedback" over and over - I know my new Dad Rock bona fides are high when I bitch that the show coulda been 35 minutes shorter without all the guitar wanking.

That said, it really was a great show, a great professional band that knows how to deliver. Wilco's just never been my thing, but I like enough of a few of their songs and have friends who would take a bullet for them and I totally get it, but to me they're always just too frustrating in that you can hear something in each song that make the ear perk up a bit, but then they insist on ruining it by stopping/starting/moving to a different part all over again.🎸