“Poor Places (Demo Version)” – Wilco
(Words/music: Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy, original version available on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Nonesuch 2002)
I sometimes wonder about the music I’ve acquired over the years. This specifically hits me when I wade through fifteen or twenty versions of a song and scroll through live versions and remixes to find the one I want to hear. This especially hits me when I then listen to three or four of these different versions in succession – something that happens far more often than I’ve realized. I ended up with all of these different versions because I’m a pack rat but also because I’m endlessly fascinated with the way songs evolve. Some songs come to their creator like some sort of divine gift, arriving in their finished and soon-to-be-famous form within minutes of its inspiration. Others gradually evolve long past their recording date, mutating into something new periodically.
“Poor Places” for a long time was my favorite song on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, in part because it was the keystone in a tenuous, over-thought narrative I tried to strangle out of the album. Years later, I still get lost in its slow decline into noise only to rise into another tune (“Reservations” on the album, and “Spiders” on more than one occasion in concert). From time to time, I think back to the demo version of the song and think about how it changed from a bouncy piano cut to the slowly unraveling tune at the end of the album. I even catch myself singing some of the cut lines in my head. Looking at the song’s entire arc – beginning with this loose piano version through the tighter-wound album version to the intensified noise of the current version being played live – seems like an easy shorthand for the way Wilco has evolved over the last decade. I’m more interested in the revision process – be it tweaking words, removing lines, or reworking the arrangement fascinates the part of my brain that likes to write.
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