Songs 15 and 16: Be Not So Fearful/Jesus Etc

Be Not So Fearful - Bill Fay

Jesus Etc - Wilco

In previous posts, I've obviously written about more than one song at a time even though the heading was just one title, but these two songs go together very nicely, so it will be a double-entry, if you will.

This is a story I'm very familiar with, but you may not be, so forgive me if i'm occasionally stating the obvious a little or, conversely, if I leave out important bits assuming they're well known. It's a heartwarming story of the good things in music and of people being kind and helpful to each other. So buckle up.

I'll start not at the beginning but at my beginning. 'I am Trying to Break Your Heart' is not just the title of the opening track of Wilco's seminal 2002 album 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' it is also the title of a DVD about the fractious making of said album. The film maker, Sam Jones, got lucky (as well as making a very good film) as it turned into far more of a drama than one might have expected.

Reprise Records (a subsidiary of Warner) refused to release the record on first hearing it and Wilco were dropped. Before being dropped they negotiated the rights to the album, and bizarrely it was picked up and distributed by another subsidiary of Warner, Nonesuch. This is all detailed in the film, as is the disintegration of the relationship between Wilco's lead singer, Jeff Tweedy, and his talented bandmate Jay Bennett, which led to Bennett being sacked from the band.

Amid all the turmoil, indeed just after 9/11, more of which later, one of the highlights of the film is Tweedy singing a song which was not familiar to me at the time, called 'Be Not So Fearful', a song of consolation and hope. My, that's a fine song, I thought to myself, when I watched the film. And that's the beginning.

Although, I suppose, not really the beginning, as the film (when i first heard 'Be Not So Fearful') came out a couple of years after the album, and I already owned the album. I was already a big Wilco fan - YHF was their fourth album, in particular I was a fan of their preceding album 'Summerteeth', which contains the song 'She's a Jar' which if you happen to have been reading this blog since February 2009 you will know is roughly speaking one of my favourite five songs in the world.

A few brief Wilco facts, so i'm not leaving anyone behind. They were formed by Jeff Tweedy after the break-up of his previous band Uncle Tupelo, who are considered by some to have "invented" the modern alt-country movement i.e very influential. Wilco shared lead duties in that band with Jay Farrar. The split was bitter and personal. Aah, one might think, this Tweedy has a habit of falling out with bandmates. Hmm. Maybe so, but in both cases, he took the rest of the band with him, so perhaps it wasn't him that was the problem [incidentally, it's interesting that that's the case with Oasis - the rest of the band has gone with Liam - it's always portrayed that he's the troublemaker and the badboy, but funny that it's him the ones in the know stuck with]. The Jay Bennett story has a sad postscript - he died in his sleep in 2009, accidentally and unexpectedly, while in the process of suing Wilco.

Oops, considering I promised you a happy story, that's been rather a lot of doom and gloom so far.

So, back to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It was released in April 2002 - I remember it being reviewed initially with some foreboding. It's harder work than previous Wilco stuff. The tunes are few and far between. It's experimental and glitchy. Nevertheless, the reviews were positive generally, and 'Jesus etc' was picked out as an immediately accessible moment.

As it happened, 'Jesus Etc' is one of many accessible moments in this masterpiece of an album. It went on to a cult/mainstream hit, selling 1/2 a million copies, so did wonders for the Wilco bank balance, since they'd bought themselves the rights [they are now a model of rock self-sufficiency, with their own studio, own label, even their own festival]. One thing in particular that people thought about it was that it had deep resonance with 9/11 - the album cover shows a couple of skyscrapers (Marina City in Chicago, I would later discover and indeed see for myself when i went to Chicago to do the marathon (behold my expert camerawork)), and 'Jesus Etc' for example, has lyrics like "Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad, sad songs".

But, in actual fact, and a little eerily, the songs were completed before 9/11, it was just the album had been delayed by the Reprise/Nonesuch business.

Anyway, keeping up? You've been introduced to the two songs, both from a Wilco perspective, which is where I was at in around 2004.I could go on about all the songs on 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' for ever and indeed its underlying concept, but I'll try, hereon in, to stick to the point.

I saw Jeff Tweedy doing a lovely little solo gig around that time, when he played 'Be Not So Fearful' again and mentioned its writer Bill Fay. Then Uncut (the source of so much info and inspiration, bless it), did a piece on Bill Fay to coincide with his two albums being re-released. He was an early 70s cult singer (Nick Drake vintage) who'd descended into obscurity but both his albums were, apparently, worth a listen.

They certainly were. As soon as I heard the original 'Be Not So Fearful' I fell in love with it. I couldn't really believe it had escaped me for so long. It sounds fundamental, a song hewn from the very rock of human experience. It's a hymn, basically. I mention it quite a lot in my 101 Songs blog, and indeed one of the early poems in the blog (Songs of Consolation) is entirely based on it. Please listen to it. Please.

The rest of Bill Fay's stuff was very nice too, though nothing, I thought, quite on a par with 'Be Not So Fearful'.

Well, after that, Wilco went from strength to strength, and became a "big American band", sometimes described as "the new REM" or "the American Radiohead" - both nonsense of course. The next album, 'A Ghost is Born' was almost as much of a landmark as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and there've been three more albums since, where they've kept the standard consistently high though the experimental edge and the darkness has slightly gone away. For a good reason. a) the band has become more and more settled and virtuoso in its current line-up b) Jeff Tweedy generally improved his physical wellbeing and admits to having found a greater contentment. This is a general problem for rock musicians who wrote beautiful songs of torment and disillusion who then "get happy" but I'd say Jeff Tweedy has handled it better than most and still held on to his muse.

I went to see Wilco in 2007 (I've seen them a few times, they're a phenomenal live band, albeit still challenging live in a way they're not necessarily on record; they're loud and angular and heavy and determinedly rock, their guitarist Nels Cline is hands-down the most spectacular guitarist I've ever seen) and at the end, Jeff Tweedy introduced Bill Fay saying "you've no idea how much this man's songs mean to us", up on stage and they sang 'Be Not So Fearful' together. A wonderful moment.

And the good stuff don't stop there. In 2012, Bill Fay released his first full album of new material for decades, and it really is super. I'd recommend 'The Neverending Happening' particularly, one of my favourite songs of the year. It's full of warm hymns about humanity. Including a duet with Jeff Tweedy called 'This World', and, fittingly, a ghostly, stately cover of Wilco's 'Jesus Etc'.

So, the circle is complete. There is sadness and tragedy in this story, but there is kindness and respect, and most of all, beautiful music.It's an American alt-rock band meeting an English folk artist and it is really the apotheosis of what my taste in music is all about. So there we go.