Wilco’s 'A.M.' at 30: The Imperfect Genesis of a Signature Sound

Listen to this article

On March 28th, 1995, when A.M. was released, Uncle Tupelo had been broken up for about 11 months. Jeff Tweedy, my favorite songwriter of all time and the king of the man-bob, formed Wilco a few days after his old band’s dissolution. His erstwhile bandmate Jay Farrar, a fan of a blunt bang and (for probably non-coiffurial reasons) Tweedy’s main opposing force as the band careened toward its demise, formed Son Volt soon after. The two new bands’ inaugural albums were a sort of boxing match: Which would continue Uncle Tupelo’s critical acclaim, not to mention retain the OG listeners?

The answer was a chorus of praise for Son Volt. Trace, released six months after A.M., was universally lauded as the better album. Trace shot onto the Billboard 200 as A.M. watched self-effacingly from the sidelines with only a Top Heatseekers chart appearance in hand. Ironic, and an extra ouchie, given that A.M.’s title referred to the radio Top 40. Trace was more raw, more authentically country, more fervent in its need to be something great. Everyone agreed that Farrar had won the battle.

And then Wilco released Being There and Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, won the war, and then dropped nine more wondrous albums after that—blowing Son Volt’s daring artistic credo up in its own face, as Farrar and co. would temporarily call it quits in 2001. I don’t want to talk about the two groups as antipodal forces any more—if you would like to continue the discussion, a regiment of goateed white guys on Reddit await your call. I posit this instead: It’s been 30 years since both A.M. and Trace. A.M. matters to me because it marks the nascency of the most important musical group of my life. Any real music fan will die on the hill of at least the concept behind their favorite artist’s more anemic endeavors, and I am no exception. Moreover, I don’t even think A.M. is Wilco’s nadir in the first place (cough, Star Wars, cough), and I am extremely stubborn. As such, I hope you’ll allow me to argue my point here.

Most Popular

My case on A.M.’s behalf is this: The album is embryonic Wilco, but it is still Wilco through and through—which is not to say that it contains any discrete element of their best work in gestational form, though this might be arguable upon hearing A.M.’s buzzing guitars and Tweedy’s raspy vocal sincerity. Rather, I think, A.M. contains a funny frankenwork: an admixture of fully-formed and instantly recognizable pieces of the band’s topography, shy gestures toward stylistic flairs that would become its trademarks, and mismatched bits that had to be deployed and dismissed for the group to find its signature sound.

To wit: Let us examine the album’s first song, and one of my favorites, “I Must Be High.” Referential to Tweedy’s ongoing marijuana problem? Sure. A rollicking, boisterous admixture of internal rhyme, assonance, and intentionally simplistic lyricism (Wilco is, after all, trying at this point to be a Real Country Band)? Absolutely. Not to mention that plunging, ear-ringing guitar carried straight from Uncle Tupelo into the band’s best moments even today, and that perfect, meanly, nonchalant voice of Tweedy’s: “You’re pissed that you missed / The very last kiss / From my lips”? Come on now.

Or “Box Full of Letters”—a simple piece whose zenith lies in the multilayered guitars that give it the gritty, all-encompassing texture of Wilco’s most self-assured stuff. There’s a fascinating paradox between the paucity of instruments played and the desperate, young, maximalist effort going into them, one that heralds the band’s need to prove itself as a discrete entity. There’s the bluesy, desperate croon in John Stirratt’s voice on the waltzy “It’s Just That Simple.” Tweedy rarely cedes the microphone, but his willingness to do so as A.M. dips into its second half creates a lovely caesura. A warbling steel guitar is his main backing, demonstrating the band’s ability to tap into the ephemeral and minimalistic.

I return often to the three-part punch of “Should’ve Been in Love,” “Passenger Side” and “Dash 7”; the sequence—and its precipitous drop from the flamboyant to the funereal—manages to hint at the band’s range and their ability to make most of their songs self-enclosed successes. “Propped to the sun alone / Jets hum / I wish that I was still there / Props, not a jet, alone / Where the sun doesn’t come down”—what a gut-punch of a ditty which, Genius informs me, regards the De Havilland Canada Dash 7 STOL (short take off and landing) turboprop. Side note: Dare I say “Passenger Side” is the best song about a DWI ever? I do.

This is not to say that A.M. is without its weak points. “I Thought I Held You,” for example, which I had literally no memory of ever hearing prior to my return to the record for this piece, and which Tweedy himself has called the band’s worst song. Or “Blue-Eyed Soul”, which is cringingly saccharine. It’s true, too, that the album ends with a bit of a whimper. “Too Far Apart” is juvenile, and a little lazy. But it’s still got a phenomenal guitar lick and a healthy dose of vitriolic Tweedian affect. One wonders if this track is about Farrar; it reads more like an invective against a former friend than a lovelorn ditty, given the context beyond the music. With that in mind, the chorus-ender “I could not be any closer to you know” has a bit more bite.

A.M. isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn good for a debut album. It suffered, by comparison, in the company Trace in 1995 and in the company of the dozen Wilco albums that followed it, but the bones of the band are there—really, I’d argue, most of the foundational work they’re still pulling from in 2025 is present. A.M.’s songs are easy to enjoy as neat, intentional pursuits of the genre-elusive, generational music the band would soon make.

Let it be known: I really, really love Wilco. I really, really love A.M., for all its self-conscious puerilism and its cautious experimentalism. Tweedy has admitted that the album was a toe-dipper—a temp check on what Uncle Tupelo fans would want from him after the breakup. The response was swift: They wanted him to try harder. And he did: Being There is one of the best alt-country albums of the 1990s, if not all time.

But, at risk of sounding overly Aristotelian, there would be no Being There without A.M. Wilco had to start somewhere, and it’s silly to expect the band’s beginning to contain all the trappings of more mature iterations that were still yet to come. What matters is that some of those elements came to the fore; ones, perhaps, that Tweedy couldn’t have snuck into the intellectualized country-rock of Uncle Tupelo’s best material. The pointed, sneering digs; the lushly layered guitar thrums; the agile, feisty, self-indulgent metamorphosis. Uncle Tupelo’s sound was fantastic. Wilco is the greatest living American band, and we have the lukewarm critical response to A.M., the low sales it generated and the lack of radio play for lead single “Box Full of Letters” to thank for that.

Read our October 2023 cover story on Wilco here.

Miranda Wollen is a former Paste Music intern. She lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.

Wilco’s A.M. at 30: The Imperfect Genesis of a Signature Sound

Three decades later, the band's baptismal debut contains a funny frankenwork: a mix of shy gestures toward stylistic flairs that would become the band's trademarks, and mismatched bits that had to be deployed and dismissed for them to find a signature sound.