Wilco is the kind of popular band that is perfectly suited to a festival like Big Ears. For the past several years, the Knoxville, TN-based festival has put on the kind of genre-agnostic, fan-focused, music-focused event that is an increasing rarity in a festival environment where the top-line band is invariably a mainstream hip-hop act or LCD Soundsystem. Wilco have been called “dad-rock” and a variety of other things like it, but there’s nothing embarrassing about liking a band that has continued to focus on songwriting and continued trying to do something new. If you don’t believe that, you obviously didn’t see, or hear about, Jeff Tweedy’s experimental set during this festival with Chikamorachi (we hope to share that soon).

On this night, Wilco took the stage at the Tennessee Theatre and played a set true to the festival’s style, cranking out several extended noise-jam numbers including “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” and caterwauling “Impossible Germany.” If this didn’t offer quite the novelty of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot set at Solid Sound later in the year, this set was nonetheless a special one, including starting with the fairly-rarely-played “Radio Cure.” The set doesn’t so much flow as exist as a series of climaxes and valleys, though the noise outro from “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” into a furious “Art of Almost” is a particular pleasure. Schmilco and its several obligatory appearances gave several points in the set a more sedate feel, as none of these songs seem to have yet established themselves as live breakouts, though “Locator” feels like the most obvious candidate to get there (and is easily the best of the Schmilco songs played at this show). Wilco ended the night with a lesser-played number of 2017, “A Shot In the Arm,” whose coda could as easily have been a message to the music festival world at large: “What you once were isn’t what you want to be any more.” Indeed, if you’re in the business of attending or putting on music festivals, I’d recommend a look at Big Ears.

This set was recorded by Matt Honkonen of the Big Ears staff with a Zoom H6 and was provided to us by Big Ears. The sound quality is a bit compressed at points, but the fairly ideal location of the recorder in the theater yields an overall pleasing result. Enjoy!

Speaking of Big Ears, we’re going to be posting a bunch of sets from the 2017 festival in the upcoming weeks in anticipation of the 2018 festival. The initial lineup announcement comes November 1 and tickets are onsale November 3.

Download the complete show: [FLAC] | [MP3]

Wilco

2017-03-24

Big Ears Festival

Tennessee Theatre

Knoxville, TN USA

Recorded by Matt Honkonen

Produced by acidjack

Zoom H6 (internal mics, at SBD)>WAV (16/48)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, effects)>Adobe Audition CC (compression, amplification)>Audacity 2.0.3 (track)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks [Total Time: 1:58:16]

01 Radio Cure

02 If I Ever Was a Child

03 Cry All Day

04 I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

05 Art of Almost

06 Pickled Ginger

07 Misunderstood

08 Someone to Lose

09 War on War

10 Via Chicago

11 Bull Black Nova

12 Reservations

13 Impossible Germany

14 We Aren’t the World (Safety Girl)

15 Box Full of Letters

16 Heavy Metal Drummer

17 I’m the Man Who Loves You

18 Hummingbird

19 [banter]

20 The Late Greats

21 [encore break]

22 Random Name Generator

23 Jesus, Etc.

24 Locator

25 Spiders (Kidsmoke)

26 A Shot in the Arm

PLEASE SUPPORT Wilco, visit their website, and purchase their Star Wars and their other releases from their website [HERE]