Wilco
Onsale Times
Live Nation presents
For the first time since 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco has created an album with an outside producer: the singular Welsh artist Cate Le Bon. The album is Cousin. “I’m cousin to the world,” Jeff Tweedy confesses. “I don’t feel like I’m a blood relation, but maybe I’m a cousin by marriage. It’s this feeling of being in it and out of it at the same time.”
Longtime admirers of each other’s work, the band and Le Bon first met and improvised together at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival, where they formed an immediate connection that inspired Tweedy to invite Le Bon to the band’s famed Chicago studio, The Loft, in 2022 to work on Wilco’s thirteenth studio album. There, Le Bon pushed the band to take risks, repurposing their established strengths and challenging them to oppose habits––all while maintaining what has, for the last thirty years, defined Wilco as a band: their big-hearted fearlessness, made possible by musical virtuosity and the secret language only a family shares. The result is Wilco’s most pointed and evocative album, one related but not tied to our present moment, truly new ground for a band that has covered so much of it.