Cousin

Description

Wilco announce their new album, Cousin, available worldwide September 29th on dBpm Records, and present its lead single, Evicted. Cousin will be available on vinyl, CD and digitally, and is available for pre-order now. This will be the first release under dBpm Records new distribution arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment.

Wilcos thirteenth studio album, Cousin, was recorded in the bands legendary Chicago studio The Loft over a period of two years. The ten new tracks are written by band leader Jeff Tweedy, and feature musical performances by the long time lineup of Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Glenn Kotche John Stirratt, Pat Sansone and, of course, Tweedy on lead vocals.

After a short detour back into their country influenced roots via last years Cruel Country double album, Cousin sees Wilco back in their more familiar progressive and experimental rock territory. Tweedys singular songwriting voice is in full evidence, with lyrics weaving across a variety of topics from the iconoclastic to the introspective.

Adding a unique and new element to the recording process was the attachment of Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon to the project as producer the first time an outsider has been actively involved in a Wilco recording session for over ten years. Le Bon brought her unique musical perspective to the bands trademark sound and provided them with an inspiring new challenge to push their musical boundaries.

Im cousin to the world, frontman Jeff Tweedy confesses. I dont feel like Im a blood relation, but maybe Im a cousin by marriage. Produced by Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, Cousin marks the first time Wilco have worked with an outside producer since Jim ORourkes involvement with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Sky Blue Sky. Le Bons influences among them the inclusion of saxophone, cheap Japanese guitars, and a cinematic, New Wave-style drum machine drive the album into the future. The result is Wilcos most pointed and evocative album, one related but not tied to our present moment, truly new ground for a band that has tested musical boundaries throughout its lengthy career.

Longtime admirers of each others work, Wilco and Le Bon first met at the bands Solid Sound Festival in 2019, where they formed an immediate connection, inspiring Tweedy to invite Le Bon to the bands famed Chicago studio, The Loft, in 2022 to work on Cousin. Le Bon pushed the band to take risks, repurposing Wilcos established strengths and challenging them to oppose habits all the while maintaining what has, for the last thirty years, defined Wilco as a band, their fearlessness, made possible by musical virtuosity and the secret language only a family shares. The amazing thing about Wilco is they can be anything, Le Bon says. Theyre so mercurial, and theres this thread of authenticity that flows through everything they do, whatever the genre, whatever the feel of the record. There arent many bands who are able to, this deep into a successful career, successfully change things up.

Le Bon arrived in Chicago to rebuild: to create a scaffold with Glenn Kotches architectural drumming and John Stirratts contrapuntal bass lines; a scene with Mikael Jorgensens cold, lonesome synths, Pat Sansones plaintive piano work, and guest instrumentalist Euan Hinshelwoods mangled saxophones; and a topographic pattern out of Tweedys electric guitar bends and Nels Clines textural explosions, which Le Bon describes as the weather, to carve a path for Tweedys yearning lyrics.

Cate is very suspicious of sentiment, Tweedy says, but shes not suspicious of human connection. With Le Bons direction, Cousin evolved into something icier and more nighttime-ish than anything Wilco have created before, while retaining the earnest quality of Tweedys lyrics and voice. Tweedy delivers his feelings, now, from an environment that reflects the one we live in and the one inspiring the songs in the first place. The albums statement on human connection is writ small, revealed in vignettes of the lowest social unit: a pair. Evicted, the albums first single, sees a narrator grappling with his responsibility for losing love counterpointed by Marc Bolan-inspired guitars. I guess I was trying to write from the point of view of someone struggling to make an argument for themself in the face of overwhelming evidence that they deserve to be locked out of someones heart, comments Tweedy. Self-inflicted wounds still hurt and in my experience theyre almost impossible to fully recover from.