You could read a lot into the fact that the opening track of Wilco’s 13th album, Infinite Surprise, also provided the album’s working title. Its predecessor, the double Cruel Country, felt like a comforting retreat in the aftermath of Covid, and an embrace of the alt-country tag that frontman Jeff Tweedy had gone out of his way to avoid since Wilco’s inception, having helped define the genre with his previous band Uncle Tupelo. Infinite Surprise, however, suggests things are moving forward again. As does the presence of an outsider in the producer’s chair: Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, clearly employed to shake things up in much the same way Sonic Youth alumnus Jim O’Rourke did on 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, albums which earned Wilco the unwanted soubriquet of “America’s Radiohead”. A generation younger than the band (her parents were fans and, delightfully, when she accepted the job, Tweedy suggested she text her dad to tell him), Le Bon attracted their attention with a radical, angular deconstruction of A Ghost Is Born’s Company in My Back for a heritage rock magazine’s tribute CD.
