This explains a lot

I had to post this link, because like the author of this blog, I know many of my frequent readers are fans of the Chicago-based rock band Wilco. A bit of background: I subscribe to an e-mail from the New York Times that summarizes its daily blog posts, and apparently they have one blog entirely devoted to migraine headaches and the struggles of those who suffer from them.

I've been a fan of Jeff Tweedy and his various musical outlets (Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Golden Smog, the Mermaid Avenue project with Billy Bragg) for years, and I've read enough about him to know that he's kind of a ... complex individual. He quit drinking way back in the Uncle Tupelo days, and he claims to have been turned off by the whole drug scene.

But he's also had his battles with migraines and depression/panic attacks, and the medications prescribed for him to deal with those maladies left him vulnerable to substance abuse. I knew he went into rehab -- a dual-diagnosis clinic that helped him kick the pain-killers and deal with his depression -- about four years ago and he claims that he's been healthier than at any point in his life ever since.

But this essay on his migraines provided some remarkable insight, or maybe just confirmed some suspicions, about how his illnesses affected his musical output. When A Ghost is Born came out, I was initially turned off by a couple of songs that extended past the 10-minute mark and seemed to me to be little more than musical masturbation.

In this essay, Tweedy reveals that during the recording of Ghost, he was deep in the throes of his migraines and pain-killer addiction, and the purpose of those two stemwinders was an attempt to give his audience a sense of what he was dealing with behind the scenes. Makes perfect sense now, but at the time, I never fully grasped the artistic intent of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" and "Less Than You Think." (For those of you who are not familiar with Wilco's catalog, the article includes snippets of both of those songs.)

Then the post-rehab Tweedy helmed the exquisite Sky Blue Sky, which hit the top of a number of critics' best-of-2007 lists (it checked in at No. 2 on my honor roll). Given the perspective of this essay, the whole album comes into clear focus. It didn't take me long to grasp that this collection of upbeat (if not up-tempo) songs was a celebration of life and an appreciation of all that it has to offer when the clouds blow away, but after reading Tweedy's insights into his struggles, it just seems that much clearer to me now.