Hudson Valley Votes will be hosting their third annual concert and rally to encourage civic engagement on Oct. 17, this time virtually. The free livestream event will raise money for Common Cause New York, a voter advocacy org, and feature musical performances and speeches from local Upstate New York politicians, celebrities and others.

The musical performers include Norah Jones, Natalie Merchant, Sean Lennon, Emily King, Nels Cline of Wilco, Justin Vivian Bond, Joakim Lartey, Energy Dance Co and many others.

Celebrity set to make appearances include Fred Armisen, Amanda Seyfried and Bobby Tisdale. U.S. Representative Antonio Delgado, State Senator Jen Metzger, and State Senate candidates Michelle Hinchey and Karen Smythe, all of whom are current down-ballot candidates in Upstate New York, will also participate. 

The show will air on Hudson Valley Votes' YouTube channel, Radio Kingston and Radio Woodstock on Sat. Oct. 17 at 8:00 p.m. ET.

For more information on the virtual event and voting in New York, visit hudsonvalleyvotes.com.

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"That always confused me, when they were like, 'This is the most experimental album ever!'" says Mikael Jorgensen, Wilco's keyboardist of two decades, with a chuckle. "I mean, what's your reference point here? Have you not listened to Whitehouse, or any music that's reviewed in The Wire?"

Jorgensen's talking about 2004's A Ghost is Born — Wilco's jagged, spectral follow-up to their masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and his first album as part of the group. (For the attendant tour, guitarists Pat Sansone and Nels Cline would join, and cement their lineup that remains to this day.)

Indeed, critics and fans have always discussed A Ghost is Born with hushed tones — characterizing it as the experimental peak of the ex-"alt country" outfit. Some of its dark reputation is deserved, albeit tiresome to recapitulate: frontman Jeff Tweedy was at the nadir of his opiate addiction — a rough patch that he survived, and has discussed publicly, repeatedly, at length.

Plus, certain moments on A Ghost is Born undoubtedly represent their avant-garde apogee. It's the only Wilco album with Tweedy as the lead guitarist, which alone makes it singular; Cline is a masterful player, but Tweedy's skronky, untechnical, Lennon-meets-Shakey attack was captivating in its own way.

Tweedy is arguably responsible for A Ghost is Born's most extreme moments. He was famously painting pictures of his panic attacks and migraines — the former in the guitar crescendo of "At Least That's What You Said," the latter in the atonal, 12-minute coda of "Less Than You Think."

In short, A Ghost is Born is considerably out there. But to solely paint it with that broad brush would do it a disservice: the album also features some of Wilco's gentlest, prettiest material — as well as mellow gems like "Hummingbird," a skipping stone of a piano-led pop song.

A Ghost is Born was met with critical acclaim upon release on June 22, 2004, and even won Wilco their only GRAMMY to date — for Best Alternative Music Album. (At press time, they've been nominated for seven.) To ring in its 20th anniversary, here's a track-by-track breakdown of the album.

When you consider the enveloping, sound-effects-laden Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's still bracing to hear A Ghost is Born stir to life like a sleeping beast — just a little bit of electric guitar and piano rumbling around.

Eventually, Tweedy's near-silent, mumbled confessional erupts into a twisted, serrated, sparks-emitting Tweedy solo. (Seriously: we celebrate his songwriting, his wit, his authorial voice, and so much more: give the man his flowers as an electric guitarist.)

Read more: Jeff Tweedy & Cheryl Pawelski Sit Down For "Up Close & Personal" Chat: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Writing One Song & More

"'Hell is Chrome' — that was really powerful in the studio, to record that," drummer Glenn Kotche tells GRAMMY.com. (A Ghost is Born was his second album with Wilco; he had joined for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.)

That power was the quiet kind: "Hell is Chrome" is an eerie, spare, piano-led lament; each twist of Tweedy's tenor is goosebumps-inducing. And, accordingly, that howling first note of his guitar solo hits like a blast of a freezing draft.

"Spiders (Kidsmoke)" is another recording where I feel like you can hear my condition pretty clearly," Tweedy wrote in his 2018 memoir, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back).

As he explains, the mother of all migraines was squeezing his skull; they had to strip the composition to basics just so he could get through it. "This allowed me to just recite the lyrics and punctuate them with guitar skronks and scribbles to get through the song," he recalled, "without having to concentrate past my headache too much."

A spiky motorik jam reminiscent of Can or Neu!, "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" is Wilco's first great extended guitar workout — which, with the arrival of Nels Cline, would gather good company.

The hushed "Muzzle of Bees" tumbles forth so naturally, so patiently, that you wouldn't know it was one of the hardest to record.

"That was a tough nut to crack, for reasons that are still unclear," Jorgensen says with a laugh. "We did take after take, and version after version, and it kept changing, and the arrangement kept moving."

Whatever extra effort was required paid off: "Muzzle of Bees" is enchanting — with images of a random-painted highway, and treebanks playing catch with the sun. And the instrumentation sounds lush yet hardly there at all — like a treebranch scraping your window.

Critics love to compare "Hummingbird" to the works of Randy Newman, which isn't that far off — a character study shot through traditionalist pop.

The vivid details — "a fixed bayonet through the great Southwest," "the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans" will take you away, but it's the elegaic chorus that resonates most: "Remember to remember me/ Standing still in your past/ Floating fast like a hummingbird." And with that, a sweet, aching fiddle solo brings it home.

Read More: Jeff Tweedy's Blurred Emotions: Wilco’s Leader On Cruel Country & Songwriting As Discovery

Few songs capture aimless, urban wandering like "Handshake Drugs," a choogling, circuitous highlight; it feels like two parallel and inverted arrows, facing forward and backward.

Lyrically, Tweedy shows his mastery of conversational, sneakly profound, ouroboros-like bars: "It's OK for you to say what you want from me/ I believe that's the only way for me to be/ Exactly what you want me to be." A cracked Midwestern-ness that typifies Wilco. 

One of the out-and-out prettiest songs on the album, "Wishful Thinking" should get more love in the Ghost discourse.

"Fill up your mind with all it can know/ Don't forget that your body will let it all go," a devastated-sounding Tweedy sings in the verse. And the chorus simmers down to a heartbeat-like pulse: "Open your arms as far as they will go/ We take off your dress."

A little more lightweight than other Ghost songs — but variety and dynamics are what make the extreme moments pop. The meaning of "Company in My Back" is elusive, but that earworm of an arpeggio, along with Kotche's sparkling hammered dulcimer, make it fit the album like a glove.

"I've always had a particular fondness for 'Company in My Back,'" Jorgensen says, before directing readers to the half-speed, instrumental outtake: "That was just such a wonderful, hot, mysterious universe of sound." 

Wilco get a battery in their back for "I'm a Wheel," a snotty blast of post-punk that points to gonzo future rockers like "Random Name Generator." Come for Tweedy rhyming "nein" with "nine," stay for "I invented a sister/ Populated with knives." With all he was going through, it's good to hear him having fun.

Read more: 28 Essential Songs By Wilco

Tweedy returns to the instrumental palette of "Hummingbird" to ponder matters of the soul. Before concluding "Illiterati lumen fidei/ God is with us every day/ That illiterate light/ Is with us every night."

When "Theologians" blasts off, it feels like the thesis of the album: "No one's ever gonna take my life from me/ I lay it down/ A ghost is born/ A ghost is born/ A ghost of the born."

"I thought I was going to die," Tweedy wrote in his memoir. "I mean that in all seriousness… Every song we recorded seemed likely to be my last. Every note felt final." Yet "Theologians" pulses with life — and resolve.

Most talk about "Less Than You Think" naturally zeroes in on that alien, mechanical drone, which subsumes most of its runtime.

"Even I don't want to listen to it every time I play through the album," Tweedy once said. "But the times I do calm myself down and pay attention to it, I think it's valuable and moving and cathartic. I wouldn't have put it on the record if I didn't think it was great."

Partly why it hits so hard is that the preceding music is so magnificent — a devastated, naked ballad with Kotche's hammered dulcimer sparkling overhead.

"I wanted to make an album about identity, and within that is the idea of a higher power, the idea of randomness, and that anything can happen, and that we can't control it," Tweedy said in the same interview. Which is exactly what "Less Than You Think" communicates. 

Wilco being Wilco, A Ghost is Born doesn't crumple into a heap: it finds a ray of hopeful light. The tumbling rocker "The Late Greats" turns over rock history to examine the underside:

"The best band will never get signed/ The K-Settes starring Butcher's Blind," Tweedy sings. "They never even played a show/ You can't hear 'em on the radio." And, as he concludes before the triumphal little finale: "The best song will never get sung/ The best laugh never leaves your lungs."

Looking back, "It's kind of hard to quantify," Jorgensen says. "Is it a rock record? Yeah. Is it a folk-rock record? Yeah, I guess. Is it an experimental album? There's certainly a component of that. It is all these things, but not one thing.

"So, I guess I identify with that part of it," he concludes. "It's a constellation." Indeed, across A Ghost is Born, there's a star for everyone: for its 20th anniversary, dust off the album, lie awake, and count them.

Songbook: A Guide To Wilco's Discography, From Alt-Country To Boundary-Shattering Experiments

A child of New York’s ultra-niche soul revival scene of the early 2000s, multi-instrumentalist turned producer Leon Michels has had an extensive reach into global pop music. As both producer and session man, Michels has worked with the Carters, Norah Jones, Black Thought, the Black Keys, Kalis Uchis, and Aloe Blacc — to name a few.

He has held to a specific creative vision for more than two decades, first through his heavily sampled El Michels Affair projects and a healthy schedule of releases through Truth & Soul records and later, Big Crown, the label he co-founded with DJ Danny Akalepse in 2016. He runs a studio in upstate New York called the Diamond Mine North, where he does most of his work since relocating from New York City in 2017. He has two GRAMMY nominations to his name, for Mary J. Blige’s Good Morning Gorgeous and Lizzo’s Special.

Trained originally on piano, he took up drums and eventually saxophone through the guidance of his high school music teacher, Miss Leonard. "[She] is actually the person I owe it all to. She started this jazz band when I was in fifth grade, and there's no drummer, so she asked me if I would learn drums," he tells GRAMMY.com. "I did that, and she would give me Duke Ellington cassettes, Sydney Bichet, Johnny Hodges. She would just feed me music."

Daptone Records co-founder Gabe Roth recruited and mentored Michels while he was still in high school, and the teenager soon became a regular touring member of what would become the Dap-Kings, backing singer Sharon Jones during an early run of success in the mid-2000s. " I joined Sharon Jones when it was the Soul Providers. We went on tour in Europe with them. Somehow my parents let me do it. I don't even understand. Gabe came over and sweet-talked them."

Michels left the group in 2006 after seven intense years, wanting to spend more time recording than enduring the grind of touring. His chosen timing caused him to miss out by mere "months" on the group’s recording sessions for Amy Winehouse’s four-time GRAMMY winner Back To Black. Despite what appeared to be a major missed opportunity, he turned his focus to his group El Michels Affair after initial encouragement from the 2005 album Sounding Out The City, released on Truth & Soul, the label he had co-founded. 

Finding his inspiration in the intersections of soul and hip-hop, as a fully committed instrumentalist producer, he was able to develop an analog soundscape that quickly caught the ears of artists including Raekwon and other Wu-Tang Clan alumni, with whom he toured in 2008. This led to the follow-up album Enter The 37th Chamber in 2009. Samples from El Michels Affair, including those by Ghostface Killah, Jay-Z, Just Blaze, J. Cole, and Travis Scott quickly proliferated and opened doors. Via the Lee Fields album My World, Michels' work caught the attention of Dan Auerbach, with whom he and his longtime collaborator and bassist Nick Movshon toured from 2010 to 2012.

Producing the Aloe Blacc song "I Need A Dollar" in 2010 further enhanced his credentials and provided the financial stability to allow him to be true to his creative spirit, which he has done successfully over the last decade.

Leon Michels spoke to GRAMMY.com about some key career recordings, including his latest release with singer Clairo.

Clairo – "Sexy to Someone" (Charm, 2024)

I met Clairo almost three years ago. I made a record with her that took three years to complete, which is actually one of the longest stretches I've ever spent on a record.

She’s made two records before this. Her first record, Immunity, came out when she was 19. It's a pop record, and it was very successful. But she's a total music nerd like me. She’s constantly scouring the Internet for music. The way people, especially young people, ingest music these days is just insane. She's got great taste.

Her first record was super successful. She made her second record, Sling, with Jack Antonoff, and it was an ambitious folk record, and a huge departure from her first record. I think it caught her audience off guard, but it was kind of a perfect move because now she can make whatever she wants. 

When she came to me, I was excited but slightly confused. What do I do? Because in those situations, you think, well, I need to facilitate a successful pop record, but she just wanted all the weird s—.

It’s this cool mix of pop elements, but some of the music sounds like a Madlib sample. All of it is steeped in pretty cool references and older music, but her perspective is a 25-year-old’s, and she’s an incredible songwriter. It's a really cool mix.

Norah Jones - "Running"  (Visions, 2024)

Norah used to hit up me and Dave Guy, trumpet player in the Menahan Street Band and the Roots, if she needed horns.

As we were coming out of the pandemic, she hit me up and wanted to make some music. We made a few songs and then after that, she asked me to produce her Christmas record, which was super fun because I've never listened to Christmas music. I started to enjoy it, which was weird because I had thought I hated Christmas music. I mean, once you start to dig for Christmas records, pretty much all of your favorite artists have them. I was listening to Christmas music from March to October the entire year. 

After that, we made Visions, which is all original stuff. Norah's just so talented. Her musicianship is actually some of the most impressive I've ever seen or worked with. She's so good that when I play with her, I get intimidated and I forget basic harmony and music theory!

Read more: 5 Inspirations Behind Norah Jones' New Album 'Visions': Nightly Dreams, Collabs, Harmony Stacks & More

We cut that record,  mostly just the two of us. There's a couple of songs where we got a band, but most of it was in my upstate studio. She would just come over from nine to three. She would come after she dropped her kids at school and then have to leave to pick them up. It was super fun to make, essentially just jamming all day.

[Overall] it’s not a huge departure for Norah, but sonically it is a departure, and it's got this very loose, "un-precious" quality. That's maybe a little different from her other stuff.

"Running" was her choice as a single. When it comes to singles — the songs that have actually been most successful — I've wanted to take those off the record. I have no idea what's going to be the hit or not.

Black Thought - "Glorious Game" (Glorious Game, 2023)

That was a total pandemic record — at the start of the pandemic when everyone was completely locked in, we had no idea what was going on.

Black Thought texted me out of the blue, and I think he was just trying to stay busy. So he just said, "Can you send me songs?" I sent him maybe two songs and then he sent back finished verses three or four hours later. Most of that record was just me sending him s— and him sending it back, and then going like that. We had probably 20 songs. 

The time I did spend in the studio with him was, he's a total savant. He sits there while you're playing a song, and it kind of looks like he's on Instagram or f—ing around, you know what I mean? Does this guy even like this song? And then 45 minutes later, he’ll be like "Aight, ready." And he goes in there and, and he'll rap four pages of lyrics in one take. It's insane. He remembers everything;  we'll do a song and then three years later, he'll have to redo it, but he'll know the lyrics from memory.

There's a couple of things that I figured out on that record. One: The thing I love about sampled hip-hop production the most is it's almost always pitch-shifted, which makes a giant difference in the sound. And if the piano has decay or vocals have vibrato, when you pitch it up, it becomes something that is so uniquely hip-hop. The second thing was, with hip hop, one of the best parts about sampling is the choices a producer has to make when they are limited to chopping a two-track mix.  If you have multi-tracks, there are too many options. 

I think that record resonated with people who are hip-hop aficionados who really love the art of emceeing. 

Aloe Blacc - "I Need A Dollar" (Good Things, 2010)

We had just recorded the Lee Fields record, My World. Eothen Alapatt, who used to be a label manager at Now Again, was a friend of mine. [Jeff Silverman and I] started Truth & Soul, but we had no infrastructure. We thought My World would have a bigger reach if Stones Throw took care of the press and distribution. And so Eothen said "Yeah, we can do that, but instead of paying us, just make a record with this artist we have, Aloe Blacc."

I had no idea who he was. And so that was the business deal. We didn't get paid for the record initially. The payment was that they were going to promote Lee Fields record for us. So [Aloe] came to New York, and I did it with my partner at the time, Jeff Silverman, also Nick Movshon, who played on the entire record.

He wanted to do this Bill Withers thing. "I Need A Dollar" was probably my least favorite song on the record. I think I have this aversion to anything that's slightly cheesy, but I've gotten better at it. But at the end of the day, it's just a good song. It got picked up as the theme song to an HBO pilot called "How To Make It In America." And then, it just blew up in Europe. It was No. 1 everywhere. But it never hit in America.

It kind of set me off on a weird path for a minute, because I got a taste of success. And made some poor career decisions. I tried to a do lot of songwriting sessions with strangers.  It was maybe four years until I decided to just make El Michels Records.  

The Carters - "SUMMER" (EVERYTHING IS LOVE, 2018)

At the time, I was making these sample packs and sending them out to producers. One of them was this slow jam, and so the producers called me up and said "We used one of your samples. It's for a giant artist. We can't tell you who it is. You have to approve it now. And you can't hear it, but it's going to change your life." That’s what they kept saying to me. Then they said "It's coming out in two weeks."

So I figured they used one of my samples and chopped it up and did their thing to it.  And so when the record came out, it was Beyoncé and Jay-Z. It was the first track on that record they did together, the Carters. And it was mostly just my original sample with some new bass and string section. So basically it was just Beyoncé and Jay-Z over an El Michael's Affair track. The track was called "Summer," and my original never came out. 

So just hearing Beyoncé, hearing these giant pop voices that I associate with absolute hits, over my song, that was pretty cool.

Liam Bailey - "Dance With Me" (Zero Grace, 2023)

Me and him just have a very crazy chemistry when it comes to music, because it all happens super fast and with very little thought. Sometimes I'll listen to Liam's stuff, and I actually don't know how we did it. That is actually the goal. That’s why Lee "Scratch Perry" is the greatest producer of all time, because he could access that instant input, instant output type of creativity. It just passes through him and then it's on the record. Making music with Liam is like that; I'll make some instrumental, or I'll have an idea and then he'll freestyle lyrics one or two times.

To me, it sounds gibberish, but then he'll go through it and change one or two words and all of a sudden has this crazy narrative, and it's about his childhood [for example]. When I’ve worked with him, he has this same process where it's just kind of "hand to God" s—, just let it happen. I was trying to make something the way Jamaicans did, [like] that brand of Jamaican soul from the mid-'60s. 

Brainstory - "Peach Optimo" (Sounds Good, 2024)

I met those guys through Eduardo Arenas, who's the bass player from Chicano Batman, and he had recorded a couple of demos from them. And they had one song in particular that really caught my attention, which made it onto their first record called "Dead End."

They’re three jazz kids. Their dad was a gospel singer and loved soul and Stevie Wonder. So they grew up on all that stuff as well. Producing a band like Brainstory is super easy, because they rehearse all the time. Most of their songs are written; all I have to do is maybe shuffle around sections or just essentially cut stuff out. Because a lot of times when bands write music and rehearse every day, they just love to play, so sections are endless. 

I'll…have a sound in mind for the record, some reference for me and the engineering hands to kind of work from. And in the case of Sounds Good, the reference for the whole sound of the record was that this is Gene Harris song called "Los Alamitos Latin Funk Love." This is kind of the vibe of the entire record. We just cut that record over the course of a year, but it was two sessions that were maybe six days each. 

Kevin is the main vocalist and he's amazing. He can do that sweet soul background stuff perfectly. And when he does [his own] background vocals, it's this thing that not a lot of people can do where he changes his personality. So he becomes three different people. Then the background sounds like an actual group. 

Behind Mark Ronson's Hits: How 'Boogie Nights,' Five-Hour Jams & Advice From Paul McCartney Inspired His Biggest Singles & Collabs

"We don't get the applause. That's later."

That was an offhand comment from Sarah Jensen, the Senior Executive Director for the Recording Academy's Midwest Chapter — ahead of a conversation between Cheryl Pawelski and Jeff Tweedy. But given the nature of the ensuing chat, it's oddly apropos.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Wilco's seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, four-time GRAMMY winners Tweedy and Pawelski chatted before a hometown audience at the Rhapsody Theater in Chicago. Pawelski produced and curated Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition), which won Best Historical Album at the 2024 GRAMMYs; Pawelski accepted the golden gramophone on their behalf.

Today, 2002's ambitious, deconstructionist Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is just about universally revered as a watershed for alternative music. But in a David-and-Goliath story told and retold since its release — especially in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Yankee was rejected by its label, Reprise.

Wilco left their label, published Yankee on their own website, and it became a tremendous hit. Nonesuch — which, like Reprise, operates through Warner Records — picked them up, meaning the same record company, in effect, paid Wilco twice.

Ever since, the applause for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — the one with the immortal "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," "Jesus, Etc." and "Ashes of American Flags" on it — has been unceasing. And, naturally, a hefty chunk of Pawelski and Tweedy's conversation — for the Recording Academy's "Up Close & Personal" interview series, and MCed by Chicagoan family music artist Justin Roberts — revolved around it.

According to Tweedy, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a pivot point, where they decided to move away from any sort of pastiche.

"There are a lot of things on the boxed set," he said — referring to the plethora of alternate versions of well-known tracks — "where I would listen to them now and go, 'That was good enough.' But it wasn't satisfying… Rock and roll was built on that thing, above all else… be yourself, without any apology, and on purpose."

The "Up Close & Personal" session didn't start with Yankee, though; it started with How to Write One Song, Tweedy's 2020 treatise on the process of… well, writing one song. Which gets as psychologically and spiritually incisive as Tweedy fans would expect.

"I think music in general is a safe place to fail," the prolific songwriter stated. "When you take your ego out of it and you look at it as a daily practice of spending time with yourself in your imagination… once you do it for a long time, it really makes the notion of failure almost quaint or something."

When it comes to songwriting, the 11-time nominee said "nothing's really ever lost. You learn something about yourself writing terrible songs. I know myself better because of the songs that you've never heard."

Tweedy offered other helpful concepts and strategies, like accumulating enough voice memo ideas — for so long — that you can treat them like the work of a stranger. "I'll go through and listen through a bunch of stuff like that," Tweedy quipped, "and go, 'Who wrote this?'"

Pawelski went on to elucidate her rich legacy in the music business — including her fight to get the Band's deep cuts, like Stage Fright, included in Capitol's music budget. (She's worked on archival projects by everyone from the Beach Boys to Big Star to Willie Nelson across her decades-long career.)

Read More: Jeff Tweedy's Blurred Emotions: Wilco's Leader On Cruel Country & Songwriting As Discovery

Tweedy also discussed the magic of collaboration. "I've gotten really good at being alone with people. So I think that facilitates collaboration to some degree," he said. "What I mean is being as forgiving of myself with other people in the room as I am with myself alone."

What was one of his favorites, Roberts inquired?

"The one that probably will always be the most proud of is getting to work with Mavis Staples and contributing something to her catalog, to her body of work that seems to have resonated not just with her audience or a new audience, but with her that she likes to sing, that means something to her. I think that would've satisfied me without it winning a GRAMMY [in 2011]."

When the conversation drifted to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Pawelsky discussed the foreboding process of digging through the sessions' flotsam and jetsam.

"The world kind of changed during the making of this. The band certainly changed, and also, technology changed," she explained. "So we had everything — we had DATs, we had ADATs, we had tape, we had cassettes, we had CD-Rs."

About her process: "I go backwards and try to reconstruct how things happen, and it's always incomplete and I don't know what I'm missing, so it's extra fun. But this particular record was done and undone in a lot of ways… some of the latter recordings sound like they're earlier recordings."

As Pawelski admits, the prospect of stewarding Yankee was "kind of terrifying" because of how meaningful the record is. "It really was a Rubik's cube. I would get the orange side done and I'd turn it over."

As the talk wound down, the subject of Wilco's latest album, Cousin, came up — as well as Wilco's rare use of an outside producer, in Cate Le Bon.

"I thought that it would be really a catalyst for getting something different out of the songs that I write," Tweedy explained. "I like the idea of working with a woman, which I felt like has not happened that much in rock and roll, from my perspective

"So that felt like an inspired bit of lateral thinking," he continued. "that felt so right to me to get to — and that she wanted to do it, and that we were friends, and it did."

To go "Up Close & Personal" with Tweedy is unlike most interviews; his brain simply works different than most, and you walk away pleasantly scrambled and transformed.

Which is what the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions were like — and thank goodness for Pawelski, who shows it's not merely a masterpiece: in all its alien transmissions, vulnerable one-liners and shattered poetry, Yankee continues to engender GRAMMY glory.

Songbook: A Guide To Wilco's Discography, From Alt-Country To Boundary-Shattering Experiments

Not all Norah Jones fans know this, but her debut 2002 album Come Away With Me was recorded in its entirety a whopping three times. Her latest, Visions, is no less detailed or exacting. But in true Blue Note fashion — it's out March 8, via said label — it sprang from an improvisatory, immediate space.

"I didn't really have a lot of preconceived ideas," Jones tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom, as a typically oppressive winter in New York blurs into spring. ("I like winter," she says. "Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one.") Despite this dearth of advance material, "We just wrote and played," Jones continues. "And, honestly, he's one of the most fun people I get to play music with."

"He" is none other than producer, multi-instrumentalist and two-time GRAMMY nominee Leon Michels; Jones, a nine-time GRAMMY winner and 19-time nominee herself, previously worked with him on her first-ever holiday album, 2021's I Dream of Christmas.

Highlights like "Staring at the Wall," "Running" and "I'm Awake" show Jones is clearly the same artist who made classics like Come Away With Me and 2004's Feels Like Home — but in the ensuing decades, her work has assumed layers of adventurousness and dynamism.

"I love playing music with people and collaborating and trying new things, and I feel very at ease with myself and as myself in all those situations," Jones says. "Which is why it works, I think. I'm not trying to be somebody else when I do this. I'm comfortable, but I love to just try new clothes on musically."

Read on for a breakdown of people, concepts and things that inspired the making of Visions.

Her Podcast "Norah Jones Is Playing Along"

Over 32 episodes and counting, Jones has sat down with everyone from Jeff Tweedy to Seth MacFarlane to Laufey for extemporaneous collaborations and conversations. Jones notes that they're gearing up to release more episodes.

While she doesn't expressly note the podcast as a direct influence, its one-on-one format harmonizes with the dynamic between herself and Michel on Visions.

"I think anything you do influences you in some ways, even if you don't realize how," Jones says. "I've always been a pretty open musician, but I just feel like I get more and more open."

Her Creative Synergy With Leon Michels

When Jones had a shred of an idea — a few lyrics, a sketch of a melody — she would sit at a piano or guitar, Michels would get behind the kit, and they'd jam it out, garage band-style.

From there, the collaborators would add "a ton of harmonies" — more on that later — as well as bass, guitar, horns, organ, or whatever else would elevate the songs.

"The live energy you feel on those recordings is from me and him playing drums and piano or guitar," Jones says, "and just having fun."

Subconscious, Subterranean Zones

As Jones noted in the press materials, Visions came from a space beyond wakefulness.

"The reason I called the album Visions is because a lot of the ideas came in the middle of the night or in that moment right before sleep," she said. She then evoked the lead single: "'Running' was one of them where you're half asleep and kind of jolted awake."

"I think it just all flowed really fast," Jones says in retrospect. "There were some songs that I had to tweak the lyrics more because they were slower to come, but most of them were pretty fast."

Stacking Harmonies — Christmas Style

Two years and change ago, I Dream of Christmas displayed a newer facet of Jones' sound: dense, layered harmonies. It worked so well on those yuletide tunes that Jones and Michels expanded on that concept for Visions.

"I'm always hearing harmonies, and I'm pretty quick at adding them," Jones recalls, and he's always, "Add a harmony, add a harmony, add a harmony." It's really part of the sound of the record."

Jones says this comes straight from her record collection. "It does come pretty naturally. It comes from years of loving music," she says. "I mean, I used to imitate Aretha's background singers. I think it was Cissy Houston. I love that kind of harmony." (Plus, she sang in jazz groups and high school and college, with 10 vocalists as a united throng.)

For Jones' upcoming tour dates on the East Coast, which span May and June, Michels won't be present. But those shimmering, layered vocals will.

Bringing Two More Singers To The Party

Along with four-time GRAMMY-winning drummer extraordinaire Brian Blade and the great, indie-oriented bassist Josh Lattanzi, Jones will perform alongside singers Sasha Dobson and Sami Stevens, who will also chip in on guitar and keys.

"We had our first rehearsal yesterday, and it sounds incredible," Jones says, aglow. She then considers the nuances of bringing studio creations to life onstage.

"Sometimes, you want to hit all the parts and sometimes you can and sometimes you can't," she says. "And you have to strip a song back and it sounds just as great, because it's a good song, and that's always a good feeling."

Onstage, though, Jones says they'll have all the resources to pull it off. Call it Visions come to life, and made material.

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