This post is titled ‘Uncle Tupelo’ but it is ostensibly about Jeff Tweedy.

I did it again. (Or I thought I did.)

Last week I told you about how these posts often intersect with what I wrote back in 2013.

Well, also last week, I was listening to one of my podcasts - ‘Song Exploder.’

Usually in the show the host talks with a musician about a particular song, and they play demos and snippets from the recording process and the guest talks about how they put the song together.

It’s very entertaining, and rarely is the subject someone I haven’t heard of, even if it’s a song I don’t know.

Anyway, the most recent episode was a change from the regular format - it was a conversation between the host, Hrishikesh Hirway, and Jeff Tweedy, mostly talking about a book Tweedy wrote.

It was interesting enough, and I liked listening to Tweedy talk about songwriting enough that I figured, OK, let me listen to some of his music, because I had definitely heard of Tweedy and his band, Wilco.

And I went through Wilco’s discography to see if there was an album I had heard of and thought maybe I should listen to, and there was ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.'

Which I was sure I wrote about as a New Thing in 2013.

And then I looked back through the posts after I wrote this and realized, no, I am confusing ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ for some reason with ‘Neutral Milk Hotel.’ Maybe because the colors on the album are similar? I don’t exactly know why. Maybe ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ just sticks out to me because it has the Chicago buildings on it and that’s always stuck in my memory.

So I looked up Tweedy’s solo stuff and thought maybe I should check that out because in my head I had listened to Wilco before, and I saw that before Wilco he was in band called Uncle Tupelo and maybe I should give that a shot.

So I listened to what the internet said were Uncle Tupelo’s most highly-regarded albums, “No Depression” and “Still Feel Gone.”

Here’s the thing about Wilco/Jeff Tweedy/and by extension Uncle Tupelo (but for the purpose of this piece I’ll just refer to Wilco/Tweedy): I know the people who are fans of Wilco really love Wilco.

Here’s an illustration about how much they love Wilco: That conversation for Song Exploder was recorded at a retreat/camp in western Massachusetts that Jeff Tweedy does every year where fans and band kind of intermingle (I think I have this right - a friend of mine told me about it and they kind of explained it on the show) - they just like being around each other.

And the fans who began listening as single guys in the 90s (that’s a generalization but I think it was mostly single guys) now have families and they bring their families and there’s kind of generations of people who do this.

But, I don’t know - I’m not sure if the music is for me.

It’s fine.

But listening to the two Uncle Tupelo albums (from what I can tell Wilco was not all that different from Uncle Tupelo’s music and Jeff Tweedy’s solo stuff aligns pretty closely with Wilco), it’s a lot of the same for me.

I don’t find all that much distinguishing one song from another, and I don’t really hone in on the lyrics to appreciate them…

I think the fact that in my brain I haven’t listened to a lick of Wilco since 2013 gave me a pretty good indication that I don’t love it.

I was all set to say when the music came on I’d give it a chance, but it’s not something I’d seek out on my own, and the fans are so passionate, and I appreciate that, so they can carry on. They don’t need me.

But now I know I don’t think I have actually listened to ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.’

So that might have to be another New Music post for 2025.