The 1999 Wilco album Summerteeth found the band shifting its sound again into lush orchestral pop, a gambit employed in part to disguise some of Tweedy's most twisted and tortured lyrics, which were about a disintegrating relationship.
Critical darlings Wilco released The Whole Love, the band's first album on its own record label.
Wilco began streaming the record on its Web site and went on tour in the fall of 2001, playing to energized audiences.
Notable new releases included singer Madeleine Peyroux's Bare Bones, for which she composed or cocomposed all the songs, and piano-bass-drums trio the Bad Plus's For All I Care, with interpretations of music by Wilco, Nirvana, the Bee Gees, György Ligeti, Milton Babbitt, and Igor Stravinsky.
In the 1990s the Byrds' progressive country aspirations inspired the alternative country movement led by Wilco and Son Volt.
In 1998 Tweedy and Wilco collaborated with British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg on the Mermaid Avenue album, in which they created music for lyrics left behind by Dust Bowl folksinger Woody Guthrie.
Elsewhere a new wave of young country rockers, notably Son Volt and Wilco, lumped together under the banner "alternative country" in the 1990s, tried to resurrect the less glitzy side of the movement.
The unusual period of stability was characterized by widening success as a touring act and steady record sales for the gently introspective Sky Blue Sky (2007) and the career-spanning compendium Wilco (The Album), released in 2009.
On a track from the latter, "Wilco (The Song)," Tweedy even demonstrated a sense of humour, singing, "Wilco will love you, baby".
Wilco, American band led by singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy that spun off from the group Uncle Tupelo in the mid-1990s and evolved from its alternative country roots into one of the most successful and multifaceted rock groups of its time.
Vocalist-guitarist Tweedy was joined there by former Uncle Tupelo members Coomer (drums), Stirratt (bass), and Johnston (multi-instrumentalist) in a new group, Wilco, a name derived from the trucker lingo "roger, wilco, okay".
