Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting Napster favorites from the wild-west days of the early internet. This summer we’re covering the best of 1999: the B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today’s track…
Wilco, “In a Future Age”
I think it should be said at the top that I really didn’t expect to live this long.
I mean it! I thought I would be taken out by nuclear war or terrorist attacks, by a hurricane or a tornado, being on a plane that crashed or one that crashed into me. That truck shouldn’t have stopped in time and that bout with swine flu should have been more serious and when I fell into that creek I should have bled out no question.
There’s no reason for me to be here. That goes for all of us. The fact that any of us is alive is some kind of miracle of the universe. The circumstances of your birth have the same statistical chance as winning three state lotteries at the same time whilst on horseback, a nearly-insignificant blip in the cosmic ballet’s dance card. But you are here and you’re here while humanity looks to the stars, while we learn more about ourselves than ever before, and while Wilco roams the Earth.
“In a Future Age” is the best song on Wilco’s best album. I hear the case for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and I point out that Wilco didn’t even record the best version of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”. Summerteeth was the play for every kind of melancholy at the end of a century, the hopeless and hopeful spanning a full CD. “How to Fight Loneliness” and “In a Future Age” were these polar opposites on either side of a phantom Side B that represented the little bits of sadness you always feel as a teenager. Everything is on fast-forward and everything matters so much, but somehow you know that it won’t always be like this. You can make promises to yourself but they won’t stick. You can fight loneliness but it won’t be at bay forever. It creeps in through the cracks in you until suddenly you’re middle-aged and full of regret.
“Let’s turn our prayers into outrageous dares” is the sort of lyric to break everything open. Before I really connected with the lyrics “In a Future Age” was another sad song on an album filled with them. When I finally stopped running the daily race everything sounded a bit like Wilco: down but with a something that separates it from pure sadness. Everyone comes to know that volatile mix of emotions as they mature, but when you’re a teen it’s simply an uncomfortable bit of emotional mercury you can’t put under your thumb. But under it all was a plea to take everything you want to do with your life and turn it into reality. In a future age you will be the thing you always wanted to be. You’ll fly so high above the place you come from. There will still be sadness but you will have gone the distance.
This song is a young person’s game that can only be written by someone who has already gone and been through it all. Jeff Tweedy was thirty when he wrote and recorded “In a Future Age”, and it may have been the only time that he could have. The burn of youth is still with you but you’ve had a decade or more to rush away from the trials and mistakes of your early youth. You’re no longer on fire but the embers still pass across your line of sight. It’s a very rare fifty-year-old who could write this specific range of emotions with the same lived intensity.
Which would explain why Wilco never plays it live. If you’re hoping to hear their best song then you would have had to have been at the exactly one concert in the past decade where it’s been on the setlist, all of thirty-four times total in the past quarter-century. It’s fifty times more likely that Springsteen will have Rosalita come out tonight. Apparently some things had their time and place. Some outrageous dares don’t pay off.
There’s a different sort of sad anxiety towards turning forty. You start to wonder how many more days you have ahead and if there are more behind you than in front of you. But to be honest it’s a miracle that I’m here, that you’re here, that we get any kind of future age. That can be the next forty years, the next month, the next hour. We can mark our page.
NEXT TIME: Seven days and not a return.