I'm red-eyed and blue.

I saw wilco play on Tuesday night at the Uptown Theater. They were great, nothing short. Jeff Tweedy, sometimes called a modern day Bob Dylan, was wearing his standard "I-was-wearing-sport-coats-before-wearing-sport-coats-before-wearing-sport-coats-was-cool" sport coat that looked a lot more authentic and strangely better than what most people spend 60-100 bucks after falling into the black hole of fashion conformity... I mean the GAP. Don't get me wrong, I wear clothes from the Gap and it's apersonal fav for the biz-casual side and the jeans just seem to always fit well.

Fortunately for myself, I was wearing just such comfortable attire Tuesday evening as Wilco played about a two hour set. Where some bands would real you in with a great rocking up-tempo song from the get go, wilco woo'd with melody and well played arrangement. Beginning with a dreamy "Hummingbird" and closing with the unknown "We Can Make it Better". I think it's pretty ballsy of a band to close with a song you've never heard before. Is that the kind of impression they want to leave you with? For Wilco, the answer is a resounding YES.

Sneak attack favorite of the night was "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" which is commonly a track I skip through the last half of being that it's close to eleven minutes and consists of mostly a trance-like instrumental loop. Something about the arrangement of the song and the bands intensity just grabbed my attention and gave me a new appreciation for it.

Another personal favorite, "I'm the man that loves you", was even more jangley, bouncin' and foot stompingly wonderful than recorded. If only they would have had the horn section of Conan O'Brien's Max Weinberg Seven to finish out the song instrumentation completely just like the night I saw them play on O'Brien's show. That was the performance when Wilco captured my attention like they had known just what my ears had been longing to hear and my heart had been saying all along.

Between the six traveling band members of Wilco, the translation from record to live performance found very little if any authenticity sacrificed. While most of the time adhering to the recorded song, there were a few diversion that kept the experience fresh. Personally, that's the way I like to hear bands like this play. ...put a little flare on it, but for the most part, just be Wilco. Done. ...and done.

What Tweedy does as a song writer is a romaticizing of the bluecollar and troubled life you never had. He connects you to real life with all it's ebs and flows and redundancies in a endearing abtract way. And the music that surrounds is nothing short of what I would expect of a modern day Lennon-McCartney written song with the passion and other-worldliness of George Harrison thrown in. Dig it.