THINGS HOLD TOGETHER.(James Tweedy)

In the early nineteen-nineties, Jeff Tweedy's voice was a fixture on the soundtrack I carried around in my head. Uncle Tupelo, the band Tweedy had started with his friend Jay Farrar, was something genuinely new, blending the rhythms and storytelling of traditional country with the mood and volume of punk, and evoking an imaginary America where the Carter Family, D. Boon, and J Mascis sat around a room making music together. The band's sound seemed so distinctive, in fact, that it sparked a musical movement called alt.country, whose fans fetishized steel guitars and acoustic songs about hard living and hard drinking. But I didn't really care about the banjos and Dobros. Mostly, I liked the way Tweedy's voice sounded--tense, raspy, simultaneously knowing and innocent, as if he expected nothing and everything from the world. His songs frayed at the edges instead of wrapping themselves up into neat packages. They were never corny, but they somehow radiated bleak optimism. They reminded me of that line from the Minutemen: "I live sweat, but I dream light-years."

Not everyone felt this way. At the time, the consensus was that Tweedy, though talented, was the lesser of the band's two songwriters, a poppier understudy to the visionary Farrar, who, even as a young man, had an air of solemn authority about him. So when Uncle Tupelo broke up, in 1994, most people expected wonderful things from Farrar, and he didn't disappoint. He started a band called Son Volt and put out the highly regarded "Trace." Tweedy, who formed a band called Wilco, seemed to have a less certain future without his partner. Wilco's first record, "A.M." (1995), was middling, but its second, "Being There" (1996), was one of the great records of the decade, a glorious shambling mess that made it clear that Tweedy was no one's understudy.

"Being There" was all over the place, as if Tweedy had pulled out his entire record collection and pillaged from the Stones, the Flying Burrito Brothers, John Lennon, the Replacements. But whatever he stole he improved on. The album was clearly grounded in a quintessentially American musical tradition, but it refused to follow alt.country conventions. In songs like "Misunderstood" and "Sunken Treasure," long power ballads that fused simple chord structures with found noise, atonal guitars, and vocal overdubs, Tweedy--with the help of a studio-savvy new collaborator, Jay Bennett--used mixing-board effects to make his songs more, not less, emotionally intense, and in the process demolished the idea that the only guarantee of authenticity was an acoustic guitar. "Being There" was a critical success, and when Wilco followed it with "Mermaid Avenue" (1998)--a collection of Woody Guthrie lyrics that the band set to music and recorded with the British folkie Billy Bragg--Tweedy earned comparisons to Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.

Despite the acclaim, Tweedy found the legacy of Uncle Tupelo hard to escape. Alt.country fans saw him as an apostate, in contrast to Farrar, whose post-Uncle Tupelo work was single-mindedly countrified. And yet, instead of just writing Tweedy off, the alt.countryites continued to follow obsessively his every move. Perhaps as a result, Tweedy seemed anxious to sever himself from the past--"the stuff behind us, pulling at us," he called it. He did so, definitively, when he released Wilco's fourth album, "Summer Teeth" (1999).

"Summer Teeth" was pure pop lushness, with Wall of Sound production, bright melodies and background vocals, and elaborate orchestration. There was nothing alt.country about it. Unfortunately, there was almost nothing that was emotionally resonant about it, either. Instead of invigorating the songs, the high-gloss production sucked the air out of them, making the record feel cluttered and decorative.

The bizarre thing about this was that Tweedy had written lyrics for a very different album, a brutal portrait of the fatigue, emotional violence, and anomie that can arise in a relationship, only to bury them beneath studio frippery. (Tellingly, the record's two great songs, "She's a Jar" ...