Sunken Treasure

Earlier this year, I was able to see Jeff Tweedy (lead singer/vocalist and frontman for the popular indie band, Wilco) at Foellinger Auditorium perform solo with an acoustic guitar, a mic, and a spotlight.

For you readers out there who don't actually know me, Wilco is my absolute favorite band; Jeff Tweedy is a man I love and worship, whose bare feet I would gladly kiss if I could be so privileged. Maybe not...the point is, I'm pretty into the guy, and I would be at major risk of soiling myself if I were less than ten feet away from him in a room.

So it's no surprise that my mind was blown into millions of little pieces even though I wasn't startlingly close to Tweedy––unlike at the My Morning Jacket show later this year at the same venue where their lead, Jim James, almost hit me in the face with his guitar.

After the show, I began searching for Tweedy solo tracks. None. All I found was a minute-long preview for his DVD, "Sunken Treasure," advertised with a clip from the song..."Sunken Treasure." It captivated me and hadn't loosened its grasp on my soul in the slightest, until earlier this week when I began looking for the whole clip via Youtube.

Lucky for me, my good friend Ryan Carlson happened to get onto Gmail chat right at this very moment, and he (being the musical genius he is) sent me the track. It's tears at my heart in the best way possible. Hearing that song would be good enough on its own, but its significance was increased infinitely by the fact that:

a.) I'd wanted this song for months and I finally had acquired it.
b.) My speakers are amazing. The song came through so crisply that it sounded live. Seriously.

On the way back from the Six Flags trip my senior class just took, I listened to it. It was night, on a charter bus, driving through the country––the perfect setting for this variety of Tweedy. But then again, what isn't the perfect setting for that variety of Tweedy? Pretty much nowhere. Turns out Tweedy was wrong when he sang, "there is no sunken treasure"––that line alone is gold.