Runaway Dinosaur

I finally saw Wilco last night in Philadelphia and they were well worth the wait. Nels Kline is amazing and this current Wilco lineup of musicians have taken this band to a whole new level, they are a true rock band now. Each member is a master on their instrument and the synergy between all of them results in some of the tightest playing I’ve heard in a while. When you look back on a band’s career and pick out their special years 07-08 will be ones that stand out. They played a long 2hr+ incredibly tight set with beautiful song selection and they dominated Via Chicago. The crowd was a bit older with a lot of baby boomers out on date night and for a portion of the show the crowd sat down which is no excuse when you go out to a rock concert. Luckily, the sitting crowd had no effect on the band they rocked straight through until the 11pm curfew. Tweedy was enjoying himself with his usual comical banter and made reference to the sitting crowd asking at one point if we were catholic and telling us ”the band had a long program planned for the evening and there was going to be a lot of standing up and sitting down.”

The band is on Saturday Night Live this week.

On Wednesday 27th NPR will broadcast Wilco live from the 9:30 Club in DC!

I had never heard of John Doe who opened the show and I was really impressed.

Check out John Doe’s music here.

If you are looking for Wilco’s Chicago shows I found this on one of my music groups. This is a link to a forum that is hosting the first four nights of Wilco’s winter residency run (where they played every song in their catalog)….Check out this cool interactive chart to see how they did it.

Each show is tagged and converted to mp3 in a zip file.

Nights 1-4 here.

Night 5 here.

Philadelphia Setlist: