Wilco in Rock for Riley
Murat Theatre
Thursday, Oct. 13

We liked Wilco a lot before seeing them live for the first time last week. But the show helped us figure out exactly why. Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer and driving force behind the band, makes the darkness and light of the human experience palpable with his music. Tweedy, whose struggles with personal demons are well documented, uses the tools he has at hand — his words and voice, his guitar, his band and all of the electronic beauty and noise they can produce — to make concrete the abstract ideas of anger, desperation, despair, desire, love and joy.

That’s no easy task. And it’s even harder when a musician sets out to relay this range of emotions within individual songs. Thus, Wilco’s music is full of sonic shifts, moving from the very quiet and melodic to the explosive and abrasive.

All of that noise on the last couple of Wilco albums represents Tweedy exorcising his personal demons. We hadn’t thought of this at all before hearing the music live. But there we all were, sitting in the Murat Theatre’s plush seats listening to sound fall apart and explode while Tweedy — a Johnny Cash in white Converse shoes — drove forward with his frail vocals sometimes buried in the cacophony. The demons of noise overpowered him for a bit. But, in the end, the light won out.

And the sold-out show raised lots of money — over $210,000 — for the Riley Hospital for Children and exposed us to something raw and real. We couldn’t ask for more.