Prompted...
by Sheridan Dupre's very recent posting of the finished piece from 1999's "Summerteeth", here is the working demo; forgoing both backing vocals and harmonica. While less is often more, I would have liked to have heard a version even closer to the song's inception - stripped of all convention of arrangement and sugar coated pretense.
Harrowing, perhaps. Uncomfortably hard hitting and brittle as shower-stall glass.
photograph by eugene brosseau.From studio sessions recorded in Chicago, Austin, Nashville, Portland, Los Angeles and North Carolina. Just as it says on the jar, if not precisely the tin.
▼ WILCO: SHE'S A JAR from "The Summerteeth Sessions" bootleg (Reprise) 1999 (US)
4 comments:
Actually. Lest I come across as some smarmy know-it-all.
I might well be one of the last people on earth to have tumbled to the underlying domestic violence theme on this one. Unlike, say, Lou Reed's "Berlin" - with all its asphyxiating self-contempt - the charming melody of the Wilco original simply swept me along through more reflective moments; left me pondering more crucial issues like getting the ironing done or the chafing of undershorts, while snatches of lyric went in one ear and out the other.
While listening to the "Summerteeth" version proper over on Art Decade for the first time in about a decade, that last line somewhat took me by surprise.
A bit like a slap.
Maybe I was just drunk on those previous occasions.
It boggles my mind how Tweedy can easily rip off the intro to 'A Day in the Life' yet make it into something completely different,,,and his own.
"In my fragile family tree, watch me floating above the people underneath."
Yes. The most successful songs, I think, wear their inspirations on their sleeves.
I wish I knew who was responsible for that Pet Sounds pastiche; I picked those demos up - alongside the cover image - from somewhere on the web a few years back, but I neglected to take a note of from where.
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