My morning ritual these days is, get up, go out for a walk, come home, make coffee, and listen to the new Wilco album, streamed over the internet. Then I go to work. And since I work at home, I can stream Wilco all day if I want to.

I love Wilco. I love them because they are always changing, and I think that is what music is all about. There is nothing worse than the same band churning out the same stuff. Music is suppose to be about the creation of something new.

I also love Wilco, because they have been streaming their new album, A Ghost is Born, two months before it is released in the stores. This is a band, a very popular band that sells out shows from coast to coast, giving their music away. It just slays me.

On a Wilco message board, I read a review of a show Wilco just did, and Jeff Tweedy (the frontman, Mr. Wilco) asked the crowd how many had heard the new album. Everyone went ballistic. Everyone had heard it. Everyone knew that all the new songs were going to be fantastic live.

Wilco’s last album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was also streamed on the internet, because their record label at the time hated the record and when Wilco would not change it, the record company dropped them. YHF is Wilco’s masterpiece, to me anyway. I could listen to it daily. It went on to be an indy hit and made it onto most top ten lists. It is an exceptional album, the kind of album that everytime you listen to it you hear something new.

A Ghost is Born is totally different than all Wilco has done before. It’s full of scratchy guitar and the Beatles and lyrics like

Saxophones started blowing me down
I was buried in sound

Buried in sound, indeed. Thank you, Wilco, for making my mornings a better place.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2004 at 7:52 am and is filed under Adventures in Rock and Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.