Every Record I Own - Day 780: Loose Fur s/t
Every so often one of those albums comes along that completely alters your musical tastes. For me, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was one of those records. I already liked a lot of Americana and singer-songwriter stuff, but Yankee Hotel Foxtrot took the homespun sound that I liked and ran it through a modern lens. This sonic update wasn't necessarily a wholesale embrace of the 21st century---their songs battled environmental noise, industrial static, stylistic option paralysis, soul-less technology, and the bombardment of stimuli in the Information Age. It was a record of beautiful songs that were built up and dismantled in the studio, with vestiges of dissonant clutter and ornate embellishments deftly woven in and out of the mix by Jim O'Rourke.
I'd watched the documentary on the making of the album, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, before hearing the actual record. Watching the band navigate the songwriting process, the label pressure, the inner band struggles, Jeff Tweedy's migraines and panic attacks, and the underlying quest to move forward artistically in a marketplace that doesn't value vision all lent an additional layer of mystique to both the album and the band.
There were snippets of other Wilco songs scattered throughout the documentary, and I was obsessed with tracking them down. I bought all the other Wilco albums. I bought bootleg CDs of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot outtakes. But the song I was hunting for, "Not For The Season," was nowhere to be found.
Then in 2003, it showed up on the debut album by Loose Fur under the title "Laminate Cat." Loose Fur was a side project featuring Jeff Tweedy, new Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, and Jim O'Rourke. I came for "Laminated Cat," but I stayed for the strange protracted jams, unusual drum textures, synth forays, blissed out fingerpicked guitar, and off-kilter O'Rourke melodies. This wasn't a Tweedy-centric project---it sounded like three adventurous musicians having fun in the studio.
But it also sounded like the more adventurous parts of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, except instead of treating it as another layer that could be faded in and out of the mix, these exploratory moments were the focus of the songs. A big part of the magic of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot involves what Kotche and O'Rourke brought to the mix, and on Loose Fur we hear what happens when those musicians' skills and ideas are given equal weight to Tweedy's songwriting.
