April 8, 2010

Wilco @ the Orpheum Theatre – Boston, MA – April 6

I think Wilco just outdid itself. No, in fact, I’m certain of it. The band’s current tour, dubbed An Evening With Wilco, is one of the boldest and bravest artistic statements the band has made since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot subverted big-wig record moguls at the beginning of the ’00s.

On Tuesday night in Boston, Wilco played just shy of 40 songs during a non-stop three-hour set. Twenty minutes later than anticipated, the band walked on stage as a computer-generated voice announced Wilco’s policies. The band slammed right into Wilco (The Song), bringing the voice back to introduce the band members in response to the chorus of “Wilco”s. The stage was much more decorated than previous Wilco tours, and the elaborate light display was synced to the music. With lights to set the mood of each piece and just a breath between songs to change guitars, Wilco was running an extremely professional tight ship.

The first half-hour included newer songs and the classic I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. The song ended in chaotic noise (not to mention a dizzying light spell), that drifted into frontman Jeff Tweedy’s casual strumming on One Wing, a track from Wilco’s latest self-titled album. Lead guitarist Nels Cline’s lightning strumming during solos garnered the room’s attention and propelled songs such as Impossible Germany. Bassist John Stirratt traded places with Tweedy for the lilting and folksy It’s Just That Simple, a song that showed Wilco’s roots and its softer side.

READ ON for more of Balaji’s thoughts and photos from Wilco…

When the String Cheese Incident announced their comeback earlier this year, they mentioned they’d be shying away from typical tours to focus on special events. For SCI’s final shows of

Today is a big day for Rush fans as the band has just announced details of their upcoming Time Machine Tour that hits 40 cities across North America between June 29 & October 2. For these shows, Rush will pay tribute to their past by performing 1980’s Moving Pictures album in its entirety at each show & will give fans a taste of the future by playing a few songs they are currently recording for their new album with producer Nick Raskulinecz.

We wanted to fire up the Hidden Track Time Machine to show the history of Rush through clips on YouTube. We’ve assembled a playlist of videos that starts in 1973 with audio of the group’s Not Fade Away single and continues up until 2008 with a South Park-introduced version of Tom Sawyer.

READ ON for the full list of tracks from the Rush Through The Years playlist as well as a full list of Time Machine Tour dates…

Wade Ellis Wilby presents Hidden Track Storytellers. This is a creative writing workshop for fiction and nonfiction stories inspired by music. This first piece was inspired by Brock Butler’s song The Weather and the Wait.

I didn’t care to look at the broken LCD display on our now defunct stage clock. She’d been to one too many bars one too many times. She was just a souvenir now; A reminder that time was irrelevant. The last notes of tour were ringing out into the depths of my brain (thanks to the tinnitus) and Sarah was a scant 8 hours away from me. Nothing else seemed to matter now and I had no yearning for anything to matter the way it use to. It’s not that my reasons for getting into this whole mess have escaped me. In fact, they’re more real to me than they ever were in the beginning. I just never thought I would look back on my life and realize that the music was the easiest part of the journey.

The dorm room acoustic sessions that evolve to open mic nights that stumble into auditions that ramble into first gigs end up rolling down some hill in the universe somewhere and one day you wake up a musician. The kind of musician and the trail of destroyed relationships tend to differ from minstrel to minstrel, but make no mistake about it, at the bottom of the hill you will have a career and a laundry list of “what could have beens”. It goes with the territory. You spend so much time perfecting your craft you lose track of the world around you and usually, about a decade later, if the universe has taken you under its wing, you come to, and realize you have actual proof of all your hard work. It may be in the form of a discography. It may be in the form of rehab. One way or another your career is born.

Somewhere in that timeline came someone who believed in you and pushed you further down the hill. When that first person makes that first shove it creates a chain reaction of shoves, a domino effect of nudges that come with their own sets of ideas, responsibilities, and consequences. It is this shoving match that moves your mind further and further away from the music, no matter how hard you practice every day. Managers, accountants, publicists…all necessary evils to an end goal, but evils nonetheless. When I picked up my first Ovation in 5th grade (what a piece of shit that guitar was) I never thought I’d spend more time on the phone discussing the importance of playing Boston on a Thursday as opposed to NYC. I wish I never found out what a “major market” was. I wish I never learned a lot of things.

READ ON for more of this installment of Storytellers…