"You Never Know", by Wilco. On the weekend I bought the new Wilco album, "Wilco (the album)" (thanks for that). I have only just begun giving it a good listen. It hasn't grabbed me as strongly, or as early, as "Sky Blue Sky", but then the new one seems more a collection of songs as such, and so will quite possibly reveal its real strengths, the way songs do, through repetition. But I can say a couple of things. The first is that this album is, I think, the first Wilco album (at least since the first two, which I don't really know so can't really comment on) in which they don't so much change direction as consolidate recent gains. It could, on that basis, be considered as something of a let-down, but that would be unfair, and would amount to criticising Jeff Tweedy for being, for the first time in a long while, in what they call a "good place".
The second thing I could say is that I am picking up a lot of influences and/or references. As these are to a few of my favourite things, I am of necessity going to be predisposed to like what they do. The opening knees-up, "Wilco (the song)" (thanks again for that), kicks with a 70s-era platform boot. "Deeper Down" is permeated by a distinctly REM turn. Early favourite "Bull Black Nova" is almost, in its first half, an unexpected convergence between my two favourite albums of 2007, "Sky Blue Sky" and Spoon's "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". But today I want to give a shout-out to "You Never Know". There is, I suspect, a nod to Talking Heads buried in here somewhere, but more significantly this song contains so much George Harrison that you'll believe in life after death. Coming at a time when, by way of Marcello Carlin's having reached, in his run-down of UK number one albums, the Beatle Years, I have been reabsorbing myself in what made the Fab Four so marvellous and Important, a song like "You Never Know" is exactly what the doctor, unexpectedly, ordered. And I know that last sentence is a bit convoluted but, trust me, it works.
