IN OTHER A&E:
Second B.F.A. Exhibit: Probing the spaces, between language, life, and art

Rock pioneer Liz Phair come to Calvin

Why T Bone Burnett kicked butt last Friday

www.wilco.com My, don’t we look positively rootsy today!

Two years ago, I decided to take a hiatus from the college life. During that period, I made a road-trip down to Chicago with three friends and roommates.

I also made another friendship in the form of music: I saw Wilco play in concert, and they found another fan.

Wilco’s music embraces the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains. The vast distances of a flat horizon and enormous sky characterize their music. The glory of the morning sunrise and the thrill of seeing majestic mountains after sparse, rolling plains penetrate each moment of Jeff Tweedy’s hoarse, broken voice. The speed of the highway, the ache of the road on the body appear in the band’s headlights as they fight the strain of distance on relationships. The open windows to the night breeze of the road and the blaring radio at 4 a.m. to fight sleep and blurry stripes on the asphalt evoke the dreamscape quality of Wilco.

The music uses numerous traditions and genres; the band loves all music and lead singer Jeff Tweedy has a vast collection from his days as a record store clerk. Originally, the duo of Tweedy and Jay Farrar started as a punk-rock cover band, appropriately called the Primitives. The boys evolved and decided to make the farthest change on the stylistic spectrum they could think of. Tweedy and Farrar thus became Uncle Tupelo and sang honestly of hard times, leading the rise of the genre called alternative-country in the early 1990s.

After Uncle Tupelo came to an end in 1994, three members of Uncle Tupelo pulled together and added another member to form Wilco. The new band diverged, experimenting and created a unique pop mix of strong music and interesting lyrics.

Their 1995 debut “A.M.” was a gem of songwriting, and 1996’s double-disc epic “Being There” was a messy masterpiece about the joy and pain of making music that brought them beyond the country-western stigma. On 1998’s “Mermaid Avenue,” Wilco, with Billy Bragg, used scraps of songs left behind by Woody Guthrie to fashion a perfect hybrid of past and future.

“Summerteeth,” released this March, smatters numerous layers of sound and style like a hall of mirrors. The lyrics haunt this deceptive fun house with narrative fragments that are emotionally taut and raw, making for a disquieting album about long distance relationships, infidelity, violence and child abuse.

The songs progress past the violence of “Via Chicago” and “Summer Teeth” to end with the hopeful “In a Future Age,” which counters the all-too-common irony of contemporary music, while the album acknowledges the wear of life on the hoof.

On April 16, this Friday, Ken Heffner and the Student Activities Board bring Wilco to Calvin College, with Vic Chesnutt, an impeccable songwriter of country-fried Southern rock, opening, as well as having an open-to-all conversation at 6 p.m. in FAC 122.

Come see a show that may cause you to kick yourself that you didn’t start the trip earlier.