Jeff Tweedy Celebrates Bill Fay’s 80th Birthday With ‘Filled With Wonder Once Again’ Cover
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For Bill Fay‘s 80th birthday, Jeff Tweedy is giving him the gift of flattery. The Wilco musician has shared his rendition of “Filled With Wonder Once Again,” which originally appeared on the English singer and songwriter’s 2020 album, Countless Branches.
For more than two decades, Wilco has performed “Be Not So Fearful” from Fay’s 1970 debut album Bill Fay during their sets. In 2007, Fay joined Wilco on stage at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire to perform the song together. It marked his first live performance in three decades.
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“I was astonished: How have I not heard this? How is this not something that is part of our DNA?” Tweedy told the New York Times of the first time he listened to Fay, who was introduced to him through the songwriter and producer Jim O’Rourke. “It’s music that sounds like it was designed in a laboratory for me to fall in love with.”
Fay has joined Wilco on stage a few times since then, even recording a rendition of the band’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot deep cut “Jesus, Etc.” alongside Tweedy for his fourth studio album Life Is People, which arrived in 2012.
Next month, Tweedy will release his third book, World Within a Song, which finds the musician going deep on more than 50 songs that influenced him and his music. Among the selected artists are the Replacements, Mavis Staples, the Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton, Rosalía, and Billie Eilish.
“Even if it wasn’t something I’m naturally curious about, I think it’s the most important part of what I do. I want to feed the part of me that gets excited by something unpredictable,” Tweedy recently told Rolling Stone about keeping his ears open to new music. “You could spend your whole time going backwards, even, and still find something every day. I mean, I would’ve killed for this scenario when I was a kid, that I could just dial up anything I was reading about and hear what it sounded like, immediately. So it’s a way of honoring that kid in me.”
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