You have to wonder whether Jeff Tweedy wanted to make a country album. It was inevitable, after the dissolution of Uncle Tupelo in 1994, that Tweedy and the rest of the band would put something out with Tupelo’s country-rock sound.
Tweedy never had a voice that fit the stereotypical country sound. More wildcat growl than twang, he brought a hard-scrabbled performance to acoustic songs like Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down and Screen Door, but his voice was much more suited to rockers like Gun or The Long Cut. He’s more punk than bro-country. The writing credits, however, show that already in Uncle Tupelo Tweedy had an instinct for slower, more intimate songs that would be featured in Wilco and define his solo career.
Those two sides of Tweedy are on display in A.M., Wilco’s 1995 debut, where he wrote all the songs, with the sole exception of bassist John Stirratt’s It's Just That Simple. The album was expected to be a continuation of Uncle Tupelo’s success in the alt-country scene. That might be why the album’s opener, I Must Be High, has a jaunty, poppy sound, even if it the lyrics describe a break-up from the point-of-view of a guy too oblivious to realize what was going wrong.
That clash of tones, between the band being upbeat while the lyrics are downbeat, are a reoccurring theme in this album, shows up again in Box Full of Letters. It’s a technique that Tweedy and the band use again to better effect in their third album, Summerteeth, but for now the technique has only limited effect. Other songs in the album will match the music to the melancholy of the lyrics, usually about relationships being on the rocks and lost connections, like Should’ve Been in Love and I Thought I Held You. To what degree this is about Tweedy and his relationship with his then-girlfriend now-wife Sue Miller, I would need to be more inclined to gossip to say. But the breakup of Uncle Tupelo and his falling out with former friend and bandmate Jay Farrar is probably the subtext of all of this, as is music in general. It doesn’t take a genius to figure what’s going on when Tweedy croons
I'm like a songwriter
You're the reason I've run out
Run out of metaphors
he might be talking about the creative process and collaboration.
Not that the whole thing is heady. Casino Queen may be the only true country rocker1 in Wilco’s catalogue, thanks to a mean riff and a good rollicking solo by Bottle Rockets guitarist Brian Henneman. The lyrics paint the sketch a drunk wasting his money on what sounds like the cheapest riverboat casino, with his “wife that [he] just met” beside him, and the solo has the same sense of drunken abandonment.2 Stirrat’s song, “It’s Just That Simple,” another breakup song, has a wistful view of the relationship:
Last week I was thinking 'bout traveling by land
And the time you remember we were by the lake
It wasn't even like we made a ripple
It's just that simple
Mulling on relationships ending runs through the whole thing, resulting in an album that can feel one note. Tweedy’s strengths as a songwriter aren’t on full display here. He chose to write the bulk of this album, and yet he still seems to be holding the audience back.
Got a box full of letters
Think you might like to read
Some things that you might like to see
But they're all addressed to me
Perhaps that’s why A.M. ended up as a commercial and critical failure, while Trace, the dueling album from Farrar and his new band Son Volt, broke into the Billboard 200. The failure of the album to compete in the marketplace seemed to light a fire in Tweedy, however, because Wilco’s next album was an instant classic.
In the sense that this is the only Wilco song I could imagine getting played in a bar somewhere in rural Nebraska that would get the crowd rowdy.
The story I heard somewhere about the recording was that Henneman had just gone through his own breakup—sensing a theme?—and downed a bottle of Jack before ripping out the solo.