Daniel Cook Johnson
So & So Books 704 N. Person Street, Raleigh, North Carolina 27604
Wilco-pedia
At this book reading, local author Daniel Cook Johnson will share passages from his recently published passion project, Wilcopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to the Music of America’s Best Band. Sure, it’s debatable whether Wilco truly is the best band in the country, but there’s no question that the alt-country and sophisticated pop-rock stalwarts have been hugely influential on a generation of bands, not to mention a generation of acoustic-guitar coffee-shop performers. Wilcopedia celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wilco’s formation with an exhaustive song-by-song, album-by-album chronicle of the band’s catalog. It follows Jeff Tweedy and company from the “ashes of Uncle Tulepo” through hallmark albums A.M. (1995), Summerteeth (1999), Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001), and beyond. The book is impressively detailed in its rundown of each and every Wilco song — even the B-sides and bonus tracks. Superfans will delight at Johnson’s insights and obscure trivia, and more casual readers might get pulled into the Wilco-verse, too. —Howard Hardee
