Continuing my look at the albums of 2004…
I must have been highly anticipating Wilco’s A Ghost is Born, and yet I don’t know if I ever got around to hearing it.
This album, the band’s fifth, followed the widely acclaimed 2001 Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It was that album, along with its predecessor Summerteeth, that got me into Wilco, and by the time 2004 rolled around, I was a big fan of all four of their releases.
This is the fifth song I’ve featured from Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky, all on Random Weekends. That’s nearly half of the album’s 12 tracks. The Random iTunes Fairy seems to have a thing for this record.
‘On and On and On’ is a deep cut on an album that is one of the band’s least heralded releases, but it’s quite meaningful to songwriter and lead singer Jeff Tweedy. Here’s what he had to say about the song in a 2016 interview:
Here’s a track from Wilco’s sixth studio album, 2007’s Sky Blue Sky. Despite its title, it is not about Christopher Walken.
I’m a big fan of Wilco’s early releases, but for some reason they dropped off my radar after 2001’s wonderful Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. They’ve released seven albums in the two decades since and I don’t think I’ve heard any of them all the way through.
Wilco’s 2007 Sky Blue Sky, the band’s sixth album, is a mellow affair. As such, I should really give it another try. I’m a big fan of Wilco’s first four albums but never got into 2004’s A Ghost is Born for some reason. I bought this one out of habit but didn’t pay much attention to it at the time.
Hearing today’s random SOTD has me regretting that. This is a lovely acoustic song, very reminiscent of Elliott Smith, and exactly the kind of thing I enjoy from Jeff Tweedy and Wilco.
How often do you see a movie that is unlike anything else ever made?
The unique achievement of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood — that it was shot over 12 years, capturing its main character’s entire childhood in two and a half hours — would make it worthy of this list almost regardless of its quality.
But Linklater used his storytelling conceit to tell a deep, poignant story about the life of an ordinary kid without succumbing to sentimentality or melodrama. He found poetry in the everyday moments that build up to shape a life.
Meet Me In Montauk 