I resisted getting Wilco’s new album for a while, because I really didn’t think that I’d like it. But then I got mad at myself, because I’m the very same person that criticizes people for putting musician friends of mine in a box and wanting them to stay there, musically, and that’s exactly what I was trying to do to Wilco. So I shut up and bought the CD.

• M. Ward’s To Go Home EP.
  
• Sloan’s Never Hear the End of It, which I bought purely because of two songs on Steven Garrity’s Acts of Volition Radio Session 26. Note to musicians everywhere: maybe it makes sense to not fight people using your work for free, especially when, as Steven does, he distributes the podcast as one big file, so a cheap bastard that won’t buy your music anyway would have to do some work to have the MP3 as a stand-alone. [And the people who will do the work to slice-and-dice like that? They probably are too cheap to buy your music anyway.]
  
• Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky.
  
• 20 Nov 1996 [Toronto, ON, CA] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy.
• 30 Jul 2000 [San Francisco, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco.
• 5 Jun 2003 [Hoboken, NJ, USA] concert bootleg of Elliott Smith.
• 28 Nov 2005 [Indianapolis, IN, USA] concert bootleg of Son Volt.

Last week, on the whole, was excellent.

• Elliott Smith’s New Moon was just plain good. Now, I understand that these are extras and leftovers, rarely polished enough to be considered candidates for a record and generally not good enough to have made some of those great Kill Rock Stars, lo-fi, indie cred albums that are the heart of Elliott’s oeuvre, but for what it is, it’s really great. I give it four stars.
  
• 11 Mar 1999 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. Quite a solid recording, with great banter. Four stars.
• 24 Jan 2003 [New York, NY, USA] concert bootleg of Elliott Smith. Eeesh. The notes with the recording warned me, but … man, this is unlistenable. One star.
• 20 Feb 2006 [DeKalb, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy. Solid; the crowd was too rambunctious at first, but after they settled down, the recording got a lot better.
• 31 Oct 2006 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Beck. I love KCRW stuff, and this is really good. Three-and-a-half stars.
• 8 May 2007 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of M. Ward. Not the best recording ever, but it’s a good performance. Three-and-a-half stars.
• 10 May 2007 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Feist. Another KCRW session, and while her band was pretty … uncomfortable … with the whole thing, it still comes out well. Three stars.