Wilco releases an out-and-out country music double album with 'Cruel Country'

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/04/ [login to see] /wilco-releases-an-out-and-out-country-music-double-album-with-cruel-country
Wilco has long been hailed as "alt-country," a label they're still a little bit uncomfortable with. But with their latest double album Cruel Country, they now seem to embrace the moniker.

NPR's Scott Simon was invited to the band's recording studio known as the "Wilco Loft," which occupies the third floor of a squat brick industrial building on the North Side of Chicago. "It's a tough place to do a tour of because it's just one big room and you can kind of stand in the middle and just turn around and look and see everything almost," Wilco's Jeff Tweedy says, who calls the studio an "extension of his home space."

The room was filled with everything and then some: microphones and amps, hundreds of guitars, a collection of ceramic white cats, concert posters and about a six-foot-tall, animatronic gorilla wearing a shirt that "gets changed every year on my birthday" to reflect his age, Tweedy says.