Jeff Tweedy writes so well about his own music-making, there sometimes seems little worth adding: see his bestselling books (the annotated playlist World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music is due November) and his Starship Casual Substack (NB: the July 4 riff on Paul Simon’s “America”). But hey, outside perspective can be useful — as Cousin proves. It’s the first Wilco set since the ‘00s to use an outside producer, and it shows, in the best possible way.
The producer is Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, who clicked with the band at Solid Sound, Wilco’s biennial Massachusetts music’n’art kegger. She does weird well, because her oddball pop always feels rooted in the heart. Tweedy’s a plainspoken dude whose avant-gardening, despite rangy sidemen like Glen Kotche and Nels Cline, has occasionally come off more aspirational than constitutional. So LeBon and Tweedy are a good match, and maybe because we’re all swimming in strangeness lately, even Cousin’s more abstract fusions feel utterly natural. On the opener, “Infinite Surprise,” tick-tocking percussion clocks a cardiac bass drum, as Tweedy freeze-frames two souls gazing into each other’s eyes (or maybe one non-binary soul and a mirror) in a moment of uneasy, helpless communion, guitar noise and synth detritus thickening and receding like wildfire smoke. Like a number of Wilco jams, it’s a perfect song about imperfection.
Le Bon’s touch is understated. Given her wickedly Nico-esque 2019 cover of Wilco’s “Company in My Back,” one might wish her vocals were more prominent. But her musicianship shadows the curveball melodies and clipped watchmaker beats scattered through Cousin — a fairly sharp pivot from the flashback country-rock Americana of last year’s excellent Cruel Country, more often conjuring angular Anglo post-punk and old-school Canterbury Scene prog-rock. “A Bowl and A Pudding” is a dubby Nick Drake fever dream; “Pittsburgh” suggests the Incredible String Band tripping in a steel mill.
But part of Wilco’s magic is its mutability (“They can be anything,” Le Bon noted admiringly), and how artfully it always cleaves to Tweedy’s narrative voice, one of the most companionable in modern song, even when he’s channeling flawed characters, which he frequently is. “I love to take my meds/ Like my doctor said,” he sings on “Levee,” a sorta-kinda love song about a relationship that might or might not represent salvation. “Evicted” is an unusually celebratory song about owning your fuck-ups and their consequences. “10 Dead” joins the sorry jukebox of mass-shooting meditations. And “Meant To Be,” the set-closer, is a feint that suggests a triumphal love song until you sense the singer’s earnestness might be one-sided. When he sings the word “I still believe you’re the only one” near the end, the key word hangs like the “BELIEVE” sign above Ted Lasso’s locker room doorway. It’s no insurance of anything, but it’s a force — like Wilco’s entire oeuvre, really — to keep us hopeful.
