A few songs into Wilco‘s Tuesday night set at Massey Hall (the first night of a two-night run at the storied venue), Jeff Tweedy addressed the crowd by acknowledging that he would likely not be addressing the crowd too much, noting that they had some songs to play, but not a lot to say. This seems a little ironic considering that I spotted at least three books penned by Tweedy for sale at the merch table. So clearly he has something to say, but in the context of this evening, he and the band were content to let the songs do a lot of the talking.
And it’s true, they’ve got some songs. This was evident from the evening’s setlist, which was frontloaded with a bunch of classics – “Via Chicago”. “Misunderstood”, “Forget the Flowers”, “Handshake Drugs” and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.”
For any other band, those songs might all be encore material, but Wilco just tossed them out in the first half dozen of the night, alongside relative obscurity “Panthers,” which the band played just this past weekend at their Solid Sound Festival, but which hadn’t been played in nearly a decade prior to that.
And it’s not like the quality of the songs dropped off from there. No, it was, in fact, quite a well structured setlist featuring a good selection of songs from throughout the band’s career, with highlights such as “A Shot in the Arm”, “Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull” and “Impossible Germany” coming later in the set – the latter two numbers also stood out as showcases for some particularly impressive guitar heroics from Pat Sansone and Nels Cline.
Wilco even threw in a single representative from from their debut album A.M. towards the end of their set with Tweedy joking that any youngsters in attendance could use that song (“Box Full of Letters”) as their chance to take a pee break and then following that up with a bit of mock outrage when one guy sitting up front actually did so.
Also impressive was the addition of some extra accompanists during the encore in the form of the GCVI Chamber Choir, who joined the band onstage to add a little something extra on “Cruel Country” and “California Stars.” After the choir left the stage, Wilco followed up with “Falling Apart (Right Now)” before closing out the encore with the epic “Spiders (Kidsmoke).”
Yeah, Wilco’s got some songs. Good ones, too.
