The five best opening lyrics from Wilco songs
Just like a great book (“all this happened, more or less”) or a great film (“It was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me ‘Baby’ and it didn’t occur to me to mind”), a great song (“I was chewing gum, for something to do”) needs a great opening lyric.
Something that makes you curious about the rest of the story, or sets the scene without quite giving the whole game away. And Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy is someone who knows this best and yet is one of the most underrated male songwriters of his generation.
He knows that an opening line needs to entice you and invite you in, to grab the attention of the most curious part of your brain. It needs to stop you in your tracks so that the song can redirect you down its own path. From there, for the song to go on to truly be great, it needs to not just have a great opening line, but to be filled with anchors, and this is precisely what makes Jeff Tweedy such a good writer. He’s never satisfied with one all-timer line when he can write a whole song full of them.
Some of the best Wilco songs creep up on you over time and work their way into your bones as you age along with them, but some hit you over the head with their brilliance from the very first listen. They can seem disarmingly simple at times, or maddeningly complex. Some of their songs seem to be about everything all at once, and some of them seem to be about nothing at all. So often their songs will start out heading in one direction, letting you settle into a particular rhythm or a groove, before making a sharp turn and accelerating into a whole new sonic universe. Those are the very best ones of all.
As well as having one of the best lyricists of their time—someone who has graced us with lines like “I’ve been through Hell, on my way to Hell”, “You were right about the stars, each one is a setting sun”, “Come on children, you’re acting like children. Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world”, “With a Sky Blue Sky this rotten time wouldn’t seem so bad to me now”, “The ashtray says you were up all night” and “His goal in life was to be an echo, the type of sound that floats around and then back down like a feather” amongst countless others—Wilco are also blessed to count one of the best ever guitarists among their ranks, as well, in Nels Cline, and with a fantastic, inventive, playful and adventurous rhythm section, to boot.
It’s no wonder, then, that they have a seemingly endless supply of great songs. And what did we say at the start about great songs? They need great opening lyrics. It just so happens that all the ones that come afterwards in the middles and at the ends of their songs aren’t too bad, either.
The five best opening lyrics by Wilco:
‘Passenger Side’ (1995)
“Hey, wake up, your eyes weren’t open wide. For the last couple of miles you’ve been swerving from side to side”.
Wilco have had a few different lineups, iterations, configurations and eras, just as any band who have been around as long as they have. In their early days, they were a groundbreaking ‘Alternate Country’ group, who pretty much personified the Midwestern stoner-rock scene.
Their opening album kicks off with the chugging rhythms and carefree harmonies of ‘I Must Be High’. From their very first song on record, it was clear that they had a playful and inventive, expansive and exciting way with words.
No song from the album displayed all that, more and then some, quite in the same way that the seventh song, ‘Passenger Side’ did. With Tweedy donning his best redneck-rock vocal slur, he follows up that iconic opening couplet with the darkly humorous “you’re gonna make me spill my beer, if you don’t learn how to steer”.
In just four lines, Tweedy has conjured up an image that could contend with any scene or dialogue from a classic Coen brothers movie, and the road to peak Americana imagery continues to unfold under the wheels the whole time the song rolls along.
‘I Am Trying to Break Your Heart’ (2002)
“I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the avenue / I’m hiding out in the big city blinking / What was I thinking when I let go of you?”
As well as experimenting heavily with their sonic palette and musical identity, Wilco are also highly experimental in their use of language. This song opens with a warped soundscape of percussion, looped and fading synthesizers, drums, alarm clocks, a sprawling, rolling and untuned piano part, dreary acoustic guitar line and assorted other noises before it morphs into something that might resemble a song.
It sounds like the singer from ‘Passenger Side’ waking up at the wheel. The clever alliteration of “American aquarium drinker” both gives us a sense of the scale of drinking which has been undertaken, but in the repetition of AA, gives us a sense of how long it’s been happening, too.
Tweedy’s use of the word “assassin” as a verb to then describe the dangers of his drunk driving down the avenue is a delightful and inventive way of setting the scene. Not much of the song makes much sense from there, but then, you always know exactly what he’s saying, even when you don’t understand the way he’s saying it.
‘Wilco (The Song)’ (2009)
“Are you under the impression / This isn’t your life? / Do you dabble in depression? \ Is someone twisting a knife in your back?”
The best musical manifesto of all time, ‘Wilco (The Song)’ is the opening track on the seventh album by Wilco (the band), 2009’s Wilco (The Album).
The sonic equivalent of breaking the fourth wall, Wilco prove with this one that they are not just playing to you, but playing for you. “Are times getting tough?” Tweedy asks in the second verse. “Are the roads you travel rough? Have you had enough of the old? Tired of being exposed to the cold?”
Well, he has the perfect antidote for you: “Stare at your stereo” and “put on your headphones before you explode”.
This is a fact that you need to know. Oh, oh, oh, Wilco will love you, baby.
‘Cruel Country’ (2022)
“I love my country like a little boy / Red, white, and blue / I love my country, stupid and cruel / Red, white, and blue”.
Wilco’s 2022 double album Cruel Country is overflowing with fantastic songs and is undoubtedly their best release since at least 2011’s masterpiece The Whole Love.
In tracks like ‘I Am My Mother’, ‘Cruel Country’, ‘Tired of Taking It Out On You’, ‘Hearts Hard to Find’, ‘Falling Apart (Right Now)’ and ‘A Lifetime to Find’, the group tapped back into everything that was so good about all of their classic albums, and yet presented a new, fresh and exciting update on that sound.
As they’ve matured and aged, so has the subject matter in their songs. As much as lines like “move across the seat, I’m gonna need you to drive these last few miles” from ‘Tired of Taking It Out On You’ recall and invokes lyrics like “won’t you let me make you a deal, just get behind the wheel” from ‘Passenger Side’, a lot of the lyrics on Cruel Country grappled and reckoned with the increasingly fraught, strained and difficult tensions that are arising around the world, not only in our personal environments but on a larger, political and cultural level.
‘Via Chicago’ (1999)
“I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me”.
It is not just the greatest opening lyric from any Wilco song so far, but it is undoubtedly one of the greatest opening lyrics from any song by any artist.
The coldness in both the words and the way they are delivered conveys everything that the first words of any great piece of literary art should do. They’re shocking, evocative, provocative, and they immediately conjure in your mind both an image of the scene and a feeling of what it is like to be a part of it all. Whether you relate to them or are scared by them, these are deeply affecting words and the perfect way to grab your attention.
Just like the timeless opening line of Slaughterhouse 5, mentioned above, or the famous few words from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, “I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead”, the opening utterances from ‘Via Chicago’ are enough to tell a story all of their own.
They contain an entire world of their own, and a whole universe of implicit and suggestive meaning. They don’t need any further words after them to prop them up, build them up or confirm their greatness. That the words which do follow them in the song are anywhere near as good as the opening lines is a testament to Jeff Tweedy’s talents. He writes alright, to me.
