STACKS HQ is still very much buzzing from Wilco’s performance last week at the Music Center at Strathmore in Maryland. If you’re a fan of the band and have the opportunity, this current tour is the ideal time to catch them. The band has been performing extended sets, averaging 3 hours in length and featuring songs from each of their nine albums (including seven studio albums and their two collaborative efforts on the Woody Guthrie project). The highlights of last week’s show are two many to enumerate, but it was a particular thrill to hear so many selections from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Wilco’s approach to record-making during the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions has certainly been well documented. The record stands as a true expression of studio-as-instrument experimentation, as songs were constructed, deconstructed, tightened, pulled apart at the seams and somehow fit back together again. It’s an obvious highlight not just of Wilco’s career, but of the last twenty year’s of popular music.

The Yankee Hotel Foxtrot record and surrounding story is even more fascinating when heard within the context of a set of demos and outtakes that have been circulating amongst the band’s rabid community of fans for years. There are alternate versions of tracks that sound every bit as finished and fully-realized as their counterparts that ended up on the record. And there are versions of songs that somehow, for reasons not exactly known, slipped between the cracks and failed to make the final cut.

It is a selection of these non-album outtakes that STACKS is excited to share with readers this week. These songs are simply too good to go unheard.

A Magazine Called Sunset
Alone (a.k.a. Shakin Sugar)
Cars Can’t Escape
Rhythm
Nothing Up My Sleeve
The Good Part
Venus Stop The Train
Instrumental
Let Me Come Home
Won’t Let You Down
Not For The Season

Elsewhere:
· Wilco’s “Basement Tapes”
· The Wilco You Weren’t Supposed To Hear