head talking to filmmaker “Where are you, Jay Bennett?” A documentary released late last year, I certainly think so. Directed by Gorman Bechard and Fred Wouter, the film was a portrait of the former members of Wilco, and while it didn’t last long enough to see the album’s anniversary, Jones made the infamous “I Am Trying to He was portrayed as the dogmatic antagonist of Break Your Heart.
Bennett, a guitar prodigy and math-savvy studio magician from the Chicago suburbs, is, at least in Jones’ story, an anchor in Wilco’s past as a naive, alternative-country barnstormer, and the band’s take on him. I had to let go. Drifted towards a more airy art-rock future. Bennett said he joined Wilco in 1996, and the group was working on his sophomore double his album Being There. His intricately layered arrangements and fragmented power of his taste for pop are reflected throughout the band’s next album, 1999’s “Summer Teeth”.
Tweedy and Bennett had an immediate but ultimately explosive chemistry. In the liner notes for the new collection, Tweedy admitted that when the virtuoso guitarist first joined, “I really had a hard time imagining how it would fit next to that squeaky, uncertain voice.” rice field. The solution for a while was to move Bennett to the keyboard. This was a better instrument for Tweedy’s erratic poetry because, in Tweedy’s words, “he was a little unsure of himself.” Call it a practical power move.
Describing the sound that attracted Bennett, a phrase used multiple times in the new documentary is “kitchen sink.” Meanwhile, Tweedy increasingly favored avant-garde minimalism, with records like experimental composer Jim O’Rourke’s beautifully woozy “Bad Timing,” and shortwave eerie recordings of “The Conet Project.” led him to A radio station suspected of spying. (One track featured a female voice nodding incessantly, “Yankee… Hotel… Foxtrot.”)