Last month you interpreted the music from your Lovers recording with a large ensemble in Los Angeles and San Francisco. You’re going to do it again in Brooklyn on August 5. What did you take away from those West Coast performances?

One thing I have to say is it’s a huge challenge for me. The Lovers music was intended as a recording, not as a live performance entity. The reason being two-fold: one is that it’s mostly low key, slower ballad-esque material, the other being that it’s all me, for the most part, playing on everything, because the architecture of it is based to some extent on records like Sketches of Spain [Miles Davis], or Stan Getz’ Focus, or records that feature one voice—in this case my voice on the guitar—on all the pieces. I don’t share space with many other soloists. For me, to do that live, pretty much goes against everything that I usually do or how I operate.

With that said, there’s the psychological challenge that was non-musical, in the case of particularly doing this at UCLA Royce Hall, where I had heard many a concert—quite life changing ones, in fact—growing up. I grew up really close to UCLA, and played gigs all around Los Angeles, and in California in general for decades. My parents both went to UCLA, and my brother works at UCLA. So, people came out of the woodwork to support what I was doing, and to check it out. It was a really overwhelming, in a non-musical kind of way (laughs).

I tried to really put a lot of that non-musical baggage out of my head in order to pull this off, because I was very nervous already about my possible inability, to pull this off adequately, because it’s musically challenging for me as well. I really screwed up one song, but overall, I think that we pulled it together. We realized that it’s playable music for all these monster musicians, but it really needs adequate rehearsal time to play 17 songs in the course of an evening, no matter how brief. So we need at least six hours of rehearsal time, and that’s another challenge, schedule-wise and budget-wise. So, it’s just a big monster of a project.

To what extent did the music reveal itself to you anew in that setting, if at all?

The commitment and support I got from all the musicians throughout the entire thing, from beginning to end, was staggeringly positive and strong. So that was a marvelous feeling for me, because many of these players, if not all of them, are people that I’ve looked up to and never thought I’d even collaborate with on any level. And then there’s my brother, who’s the only person I ever wanted to play this music because of his certain abilities he has. He’s played with me my whole life. But there are other people like Vinny Golia, who I’ve played with on and off since 1975-76, something like that. Then on the record, and coming up, there’s all these people like J.D. Parran, Steven Bernstein, Doug Wieselman, Erik Friedlander, all these people that I’ve listened to and loved forever.

So that that was one thing, musically speaking—I guess the fact that I could pull it off at all as an instrumentalist was kind of a revelation, because sometimes just blowing in a jazz matter over chord changes and not sounding like some kind of jazz-by-numbers guy is quite a challenge for me. I think I kind of pulled it off, for the most part. Also, I still love the arrangements; I still love the project. I was particularly pleased that some of the pieces I worried about being a little bit too abstract, or too odd or too dark, actually enlivened the program. And on “Lady Gabor” we really get to go for it, which kind of is fun, just to have a pan-modal droner that everyone can kind of almost rock out on. That really took on a life of its own too, so that was cool.

You mention your concern about the reception of this music. In that setting, how conscious were you of audience response and engagement?

I think in the past I’ve sort of poked fun at myself as being somewhat of a Vaudevillian, in that with pretty much everything I do, except completely free improvisation, I am thinking about the audience. I’m trying to create an experience for them. It’s not just for me. I want to have a balanced program; I want to have high highs, low lows, slow, fast, free, structured, loud, soft. I want to have all those things because that’s what I like. My music—if it’s about anything—is about this kind of balance between many different elements, sometimes stylistic elements that seem at odds with each other. Maybe that means I have no identity, but it is something I strive for. I do that as much for the audience as for myself.

In the case of Lovers, and actually all my recordings of my old stuff, I have to say that I’m really, for the most part, pleasing myself before everyone else, but I’m still thinking about who’s listening. Lovers was really created as an obsessive project pretty much for me. It’s something it seems like I’ve thought about forever.

But I worried about what the audience would think, or what they’re experiencing because I wanted it to be a compelling experience. I didn’t want it to be a me me me thing, which Lovers is in terms of the way it’s structured with me as the so-called voice out front of everything all the time. That’s not my normal impulse at all, as a musician. I don’t want to be the dude all the time. But that said, when I perform, I don’t look at the audience, even with Wilco for the most part. I pretty much play with the same focus, or the same mindset, when I’m playing for 40 people at the Stone as I do for 4,000 people with Wilco.

Speaking of Wilco, one final question: At Solid Sound this year, you’re going to open the festival by playing one studio album in its entirety, which will be selected by your fans. If you could pick, which album would you select?

Well, I’m pretty sure I know which one’s going to get voted for. I think it’s probably pretty obvious that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will win, but maybe I’m wrong. I would say it would be interesting to do Being There, but I would probably pick The Whole Love. It would be fun to play Sky Blue Sky because it was the first record Pat and I did, because there are songs on that record that we love, that Wilco audience members don’t seem to be so in love with. So, it’s always fun to torment them with “Shake it Off” or something. I would love to play “Leave Me (Like You Found Me)” someday, more than once. I think we’ve only played that song live once, and I love that song. I think we all like a lot of the slower, more low-key sometimes mildly, if not phenomenally, depressing songs, but they don’t always make for an exciting live show, so they sort of get shunted to the back of the pile. By playing a record that was less popular, we would be able to re-attack and reassess some of these songs that haven’t been played hardly at all, which for me is a fun and exciting idea. To be honest, we play all those Yankee Hotel Foxtrot songs quite frequently, so it won’t be a challenge if they vote for that one, but it’ll still be some kind of an event.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will win, because I suspect that the people who are going to make the effort to vote will want to hear you guys go a little bit deeper into your catalog.

Maybe it’ll be Being There, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be The Whole Love though, or Wilco (The Album) . We’ll just have to see.

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