Wilco Re-embraces Country Music, After a Long Estrangement, on Forthcoming ‘Cruel Country’ Album

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticWith Wilco’s first couple of albums in the mid-1990s, the band got saddled with an “alt-country” tag that was perhaps inevitable, especially coming out of the ruins of Uncle Tupelo, a group that helped form that subgenre as a movement.

And for the last quarter-century or so, Jeff Tweedy and company have endeavored to shake it off. But in what may be either a case of new inspiration or “if you can’t beat it, rejoin it,,” Wilco is finally “going country,” as Tweedy puts it with tongue only partly in cheek, on a new album.Due out May 27, the double album “Cruel Country” has a clear double meaning in its title, referring to a promised running commentary on America and its history that will be accompanied by Wilco apparently embracing country music as a form in a bigger way than it did even in its earliest, rootsy, pre-“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” days.

That same weekend, Wilco will premiere the album live at its Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, MA, playing the collection in its entirety.Thursday’s announcement arrived with the release of a music video for a song from the new set, “Falling Apart (Right Now)” (see below), that gives a strong indication of the direction of the project.“I think there’s been an assumption over the years that Wilco is some sort of country band,” Tweedy wrote in an essay-long piece announcing the project. “To be specific, early on, coming out of Uncle Tupelo, that really felt like a widely held belief.

And, sure, there’s a lot of evidence to support that way of thinking about our band, because there have been elements of country music in everything we’ve ever done.