America’s favorite alt-county/rock band Wilco has marked their twentieth anniversary in existence with a pair of anthological releases (the odds ‘n’ ends box-set Alpha Mike Foxtrot and a 2-disc ‘best of’ compilation What’s Your 20?). They’ve also been celebrating two decades of music with road shows, and on December 15 they announced a handful of new dates in the South, the first lined up for 2015.
Frontman Jeff Tweedy — who recently took a break from his main gig to make the well-received Sukierae with son Spencer — will be the main reason Wilco fans will come out for the shows, of course. But that doesn’t mean Nels Cline, who joined the band in 2004 when they were looking for another guitarist, won’t go unnoticed by Wilco’s savvy fan base. “Wilco fans are very loyal to Wilco,” said Cline in an exclusive Something Else! Sitdown, “but they’re (also) loyal in the sense that if I’m playing in their town with the Nels Cline Singers even if they assume that ‘Nels is going to do one of his weird instrumental things,’ they just like to see me play and support me. So these fans have kind of doubled our audience and when we’re playing in these small clubs and a hundred people show up instead of fifty, that’s a huge difference. It’s great.”
Cline hadn’t exactly sat still while Tweedy enjoyed some quality father-son time; he released a surprisingly simpatico guitar summit with Julian Lage (Room) and another Nels Cline Singers album Macroscope, just named our favorite fusion record of 2014. And don’t forget Cline’s live-to-tape encounter with Medeski, Martin and Wood. The break and the subsequent reconvening was always intended: “I think Jeff thought it would be a good time to go off and do our individual things and then come back together with some fresh perspective.”
The band has already toured some in the fall in celebration of its 20th anniversary, just wrapping up on December 12. Will there be any work on a follow-up to 2011’s The Whole Love after then? Cline reveals that they’ve started already, but after the fall shows, they’ll “do a little more and keep recording.”
And then, they’ll do a little more jamming on stage. Here are the 2015 tour dates booked so far:
04/22 – Dallas, TX @ McFarlin Memorial Auditorium
04/23 – Houston, TX @ Bayou Music Center
04/26 – Tallahassee, FL @ Capital City Amphitheater
04/28 – Orlando, FL @ Hard Rock Live Orlando
05/01 – St. Augustine, FL @ St. Augustine Amphitheater
06/26-28 – North Adams, MA @ Sound Solid Festival
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