THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022 21
Converse Jack Purcell glasses, Tweedy
tilted more Neorealismo than spaghetti
Western. Distant eyes, apologetic laugh.
His father worked on the railroad in
southern Illinois. “My upbringing isn’t
super-country,” he said. “It’s Midwest.
But when we cleaned out my mom and
dad’s house there was this bag of cow-
boy boots. My mom had kept all the
boots I’d worn up until when I was five
or six, maybe, with holes in the bottom.
Dozens of pairs.”
Wilco’s predecessor, Uncle Tupelo,
which dissolved in 1994, after Tweedy
split with Jay Farrar, pioneered alt-coun-
try––banjo, harmonica, fiddle, Tweedy’s
punk wit, Farrar’s gloom. For years,
Wilco dodged sonic expectations. But
why fight the wind? The band is good
at writing country songs. Simple forms
gave the guitarist Nels Cline and the
drummer Glenn Kotche room to get
weird. The guys got together this win-
ter and recorded the live takes. “I’m not
a big jam-band fan or anything, but this
is kind of my version,” Tweedy said of
a five-minute instrumental break. “Like,
what I always picture people liking about
that music.”
The album began as an exercise in a
group chat that Tweedy had with the
writer George Saunders and the come-
dian Nick Offerman. (“We’re all in love,”
Offerman once explained.) At the out-
set of the pandemic, Tweedy vowed to
send them a demo a day. A lot of peo-
ple, it seemed to him, were talking about
what America was, or hadn’t been, or
ought to be again, but they weren’t re-
ally saying anything. “Anything you1
PAN D EM I CPROJECT
HATTRICK
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eff Tweedy, of Wilco, retired his trade-
mark off-white Stetson about five
years ago after he looked out from the
stage one night and saw that a number
of fans were wearing the same hat. “I
felt like Madonna,” he said the other
day, in Chicago. He’s played largely hat-
less ever since. But for Wilco’s twelfth
studio album the band is returning to
its roots (roots music), and the fifty-
four-year-old front man is feeling ready
to reinstate the image repertoire. The
band will première all twenty-one tracks
of “Cruel Country”––“I love my coun-
try, stupid and cruel”—at Solid Sound,
the music-and-arts festival that it throws
every two years at Mass Moca: lawn
chairs, vintage Luccheses, craft I.P.A.
Tweedy had to complete the costume.
In search of a new hat, Tweedy wan-
dered the leather-fragrant aisles at Al-
cala’s Western Wear, a vaquero haber-
dashery in Chicago, which has been his
home since the nineties. He passed hats
that, he said, were suitable for a villain-
ous Mountie, R. L. Stine, Lemmy from
Motörhead, and the photo booth at his
cousin’s bar mitzvah. But he struggled
to find something that felt like him. A
lot was riding on this purchase. “My first
live review comes out where I’m wear-
ing a stupid hat,” he prophesied gravely.
“ ‘Ruined by a Stupid Hat: It was a great
show—can’t believe he wore that hat.’ ”
In a charcoal button-down and black
think is different isn’t different,” Tweedy
said. The same pathologies repeat
through the generations. He gestured
toward an angular cattleman hat em-
bellished with creases. “It’s like the early
version of distressed jeans,” he said. “Peo-
ple wanted ’em to look like you’d had
’em for a while. Think about it, a guy
two hundred years ago, and he’s, like, ‘I
can’t walk out in front of the guys in
this!’ ” (Tweedy defers to his wife, Sue
Miller, for such aesthetic validation. She
was the other reason he stopped wear-
ing cowboy hats: “She thinks I look
cuter. It’s hard for me to say that. I feel
way cuter with the hat.”)
He picked up what looked like a small
buckskin umbrella—promising. “If you
get a big enough brim, maybe it will
draw attention away from my waistline,”
he said. Inspecting himself in a mirror,
he smoothed his shirttails over his hips.
“I keep trying to buy bigger guitars.”
After an hour, he opted for a beige
Stetson. “No, you have that,” his studio
manager said.
“We don’t have this!” Tweedy protested.
On the way to the register, a sales as-
sociate entreated Tweedy to peruse the
aisles of cattle prods and thousand-dollar
piteado belts, but Tweedy demurred.
“I’ve got full-on Nudie suits and shit,”
he said. “I just haven’t been able to fit
into them for a long time.”
He went on, “I blame Jamba Juice. I
haven’t been there in years, but I’m still
paying for it. I got out of the hospital sev-
enteen years ago”—rehab—“and I weighed
a hundred sixty-five pounds because I
had lost so much weight from anxiety
and shit. And thought, Ah, this is great!
Clothes fit. I’m sober, I’m clean. I’m gonna
keep this up. I’m only gonna eat smooth-
ies on the road.” After months of down-
ing Peanut Butter Moo’ds (frozen yogurt,
bananas, chocolate milk), his running
shorts got tight. He decided, “I’m just
gonna get Jamba Juice twice a day. And
then I was sitting there one day, waiting
for my order. And I’m flipping through
their book of nutritional facts.. .”
Reformed, he tried out a new diet.
“I made a bet with my wife that I could
lose weight eating only Snickers,” he
said.
“Who won that bet?” his studio man-
ager asked.
“Susie did.”
Jeff Tweedy —Hannah Seidlitzpay off—she aims to increase tourism
from a million and a half visitors a year
to five million.
AFTER-ACTION REPORT: Despite
mission creep, objective attained. Pres-
idential Park assessment: “I’m impressed.
The Park is big.” Première status: suc-
cess. President bullish on next screen-
ing, in Los Angeles. “I’ll meet my fel-
low movie stars,” she says. “Peter, who
have you invited?”
Greenberg: “I cannot reveal.”
Hassan, shrugging: “Maybe Will
Smith.”
—Zach Helfand