Tom Waits had already traveled some miles off the beaten path when he released his first albums, 1973’s Closing Time and 1974’s The Heart of Saturday Night. Eschewing the melodic folk-rock styles of his Southern California musical contemporaries, he offered gruff vocals, bluesy, jazz-influenced music that evoked an after-hours session in a seedy bar, and […]
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In 2001, when Wilco presented Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to Warner/Reprise, the company famously deemed it insufficiently commercial. The label said it would not issue the record as is—a decision that now seems about as foolish as Columbia’s refusal to approve the U.S. release of Leonard Cohen’s Various Positions LP, which includes the classic “Hallelujah.” Wilco […]
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Wilco’s terrific Summerteeth—the group’s third album, which first appeared in 1999—expands to more than four times its original length in a recently issued deluxe edition. The clamshell-boxed set couples a remaster of the adventurous original record to a wealth of previously unreleased material, including two dozen demos and outtakes and a 26-song contemporaneous Boulder, Colorado, […]
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