Chicago has given us many things over the years. Awesome pizza. Billy Corgan. The Cubs, who will always do worse than the Reds. And each winter a chance to look at the weather report and not feel quite as downtrodden about “all the snow” that we get. Chicago’s greatest gift to the world, however, came in 1994 with the birth of a little band called Wilco.
He is Steve Gunn, a now-Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Philadelphian who has actually been recording albums since 2007. But until 2013’s Time Off album, his small-label records had been instrumental and often shared with collaborators. But with the relatively traditional song structures, vocals and fuller band sound of last year’s Way Out Weather on the amusingly named Paradise of Bachelors label — an album that placed on many “Best of the Year” lists — things have started to happen for him.
