Video of the Day: Wilco, Mavis Staples and Nick Lowe

The Video of the Day entries at this site select performances that reward attention. The Wilco, Mavis Staples, and Nick Lowe footage rewards substantial attention.

The three artists represent different generations, different traditions, and different approaches to American music. Watching them share a stage is an argument — made musically rather than rhetorically — about what connects the American popular music traditions.

The three artists

Wilco arrived in the mid-1990s from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo and spent the following fifteen years making records that couldn't be easily categorized. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) is the record that brought the band to a wide audience, but the catalog on either side of it contains as much interesting work. Jeff Tweedy's songwriting, at its best, is in direct conversation with the American folk and country song tradition, using that conversation to say things the tradition itself might not allow.

Mavis Staples is one of the great voices in American gospel and soul music. The Staple Singers were a civil rights-era institution whose music connected the church tradition to the broader movement. Mavis as a solo artist has worked with producers including Prince and Wilco's own Jeff Tweedy, who produced her records You Are Not Alone (2010) and One True Vine (2013).

Nick Lowe is British, which complicates the American roots claim, but his songwriting — "Heart of the City," "Cruel to Be Kind," "The Beast in Me" — is in continuous dialogue with American country, soul, and folk. His bass-and-voice recordings from later in his career sound like American music made by someone who understood it from the outside, which is its own kind of understanding.

What the footage contains

The three of them together produce the particular pleasure of watching traditions meet. The specific performance — where they are, what they play, how the combination sounds — shows something about the common ground underneath the apparent differences.

This is what this site is interested in: the place where the traditions converge, where the connections become audible.

More at Field Notes.