Wilco Plans To Shake Up Setlists For Upcoming ‘Schmilco’ Tour

Tonight, Wilco kicks off a three-week tour in support of the soon-to-be-released Schmilco LP with a show in Salt Lake City. For those who haven’t been all that excited by the band’s smaller than usual rotation over the past year or so, there’s good news. The members of Wilco recently sat for an interview with Consequence of Sound in which they reveal “everything’s on the table” and that fans can expect them to “definitely shake it up more from night-to-night.”

Frontman Jeff Tweedy discussed the setlists for the upcoming run, which includes a five-night stand at The Fillmore in San Francisco. “Now that we’re back in the States, and we’re going to be doing these multiple-night runs, we’ll definitely shake it up more from night to night. I just played Pickathon by myself. I played two nights, and I didn’t do any of the same songs. I did like 40-something songs in two nights. The formula isn’t really a formula. Sometimes, it’s based on how much time we’ve had to get together and play, but we always have a rehearsal space in the venue. We have a room that we set up every day to rehearse while we’re on the road,” Tweedy said.

How exactly does Tweedy formulate each setlist? “We look at what we played last time we were in town, try and change at least half of it, then — we’ve taken it down now, but we had a request thing on our website — we’d get a printout of what the top request is. The songs nobody wants to hear always have like a thousand requests because some super fan has, like, hacked the system. [Laughs] Oh, really, you want to hear the Japanese B-side of this? So, it’s kind of like you scratch out the Russian judges, the top ones and the low ones, and you just kind of pick the middle ones. And look for a few things we haven’t played in a while.”

The frontman has us excited with his thoughts on what is and what isn’t on the table, “Basically, everything’s on the table all the time, because we as a band have played almost everything, barring a few songs. And there’s never been a period where we’ve stopped playing anything, really. I mean, we didn’t really play Wilco (The Album) stuff for a while, but that was more just because we toured a lot and once we had our own label and other stuff in place, we figured out, if we were going to sell our shows online as a road case thing, I didn’t want to have to pay Warner Brothers to play our own material. Because it hadn’t reverted to us yet, so we stopped playing a lot of that material, just on principle. Either we were going to have to cut those songs out of those things or pay them a royalty.”

Another topic of discussion about the upcoming tour is the more bare bones setup Wilco will use during the run. Even guitarist Nels Cline, known for his massive rig, will cut down the amount of gear he will use for the tour. Over the past two years Wilco has been devoting a portion of most shows to acoustic performances and it appears we can expect more where that came from as they tour Schmilco. Head to CoS for the complete interview. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for tonight’s show in Salt Lake City and beyond.