Song #18 // Wilco “I Might” [The Whole Love]
For me, Wilco will always be wintry days, when the snow blows small and in pellet form, like stones thrown from the sky, dryly accumulating in piles that are whisked away by ungloved hands or anxiously unfrozen wiper blades.
It’s a time in grey, when ponds and roadside ravines realize their standing water is a shield that can protect them from the coming months, and in a rush they work to solidify in bubbles and white ice that breaks like glass with the first sign of pressure. It’s a learning curve in the waning months of the year.
Of course all of this is embodied, for me, in Wilco’s double-album Being There, which remains one of the most influential and time-tested albums I own. It marked a clear departure for my musical tastes: away from the grunge-heavy metalistic sounds of my high school years and into a more nuanced songwriter form, notably exercised on album opener “Misunderstood.”
I can’t remember for the life of me where I first heard of Wilco or what brought me to buy their LP. But I can remember driving slowly around my boyhood neighborhood, playing the same songs on my CD player in the middle of winter, circling over frost, ice, and bittersweet alive memories as I tried to find a reason to go home, or a reason to keep going.
I remember driving with my boyhood bestie, Matt, as we traveled to and from the nearby exotic land of Ann Arbor, less than an hour away but magic in its offerings of used music and book stores. At the time of Being There I never would have thought that I’d be there, in Ann Arbor, less than a year later as a student. Everything was still so uncertain and slowed in its icy environs.
This song is not that.
Its 1960s pop-influenced organ drives the song in a way that initially drove me away. Hearing the song on near repeat every day this past summer while listening to CBC Radio 2 I couldn’t stand it on the first dozen listens or so.
But then something happened: its, loop, its melody, became an ear-worm that bore into my skull almost overnight. I suddenly couldn’t live without the song, much in the way as a high schooler I couldn’t live without misery; how else can you possibly explain Morrissey?
Years ago when I lived full time in San Francisco an ex-friend of mine and I were debating who would be our generation’s Beatles. In other words, who would transcend time in a way that they were not only popular in the present tense, but would also be looked back on as one of the most influential and longstanding bands at the dawn of the 21st century.
I don’t remember my response. It was probably some Pitchfork-esque nod to Radiohead or something dumb. But she said Wilco, and I’ll never forget how stupid that sounded. At the time they were hovering just above mediocre popularity; appreciated for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but not really followed in the way that bands du jour such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were.
I’m still not sure that she was right; only time will tell. But that conversation, and this band’s place in my life, is frozen in my memory as a kind of mile marker of my appreciation of music. This song will live on less as a 2011 super hit than it will as the final weeks of my bachelorhood, when I drove around SE Michigan wondering if I could possibly ever share my selfish life with someone else; whether someone else would ever want to share hers with me.
