Being There

Being There is Wilco’s second studio album released October 29, 1996 by the band’s first label, Reprise Records. The mixture of a country-rock sound left over from Tweedy and Farrar’s Uncle Tupelo days and newfound psychedelic experimentalism provided for a unique dichotomy that the band purposefully enhanced by practicing, recording, and mixing songs in the time span of a single day.

There are unabashed hints at the animosity left behind from Uncle Tupelo’s breakup. John Stirratt, previously a guitar tech for Uncle Tupelo before joining the Anodyne-era lineup, expressed to Rolling Stone’s David Fricke “I don’t think we’d be lying if we said the record has kind of a ‘fuck you’ attitude.”

Critics responded favorably to Being There. Rolling Stone magazine’s Greg Kot bestowed a 5/5 star rating on the album.

AllMusic’s Jason Ankeny gave the album 4.5/5 stars writing:

While Wilco’s debut, A.M., spread its wings in an expectedly country-rock fashion, their sophomore effort, Being There, is the group’s great leap forward, a masterful, wildly eclectic collection shot through with ambitions and ideas. Although a few songs remain rooted in their signature sound, here Jeff Tweedy and band are as fascinated by their music’s possibilities as its origins, and they push the songs which make up this sprawling two-disc set down consistently surprising paths and byways.

Despite common misconceptions surrounding the origin of the album’s name, Tweedy says that the choice was not inspired by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel of the same name (or the subsequent film adaptation, starring Peter Sellers). When asked, Tweedy simply said, “I just liked the phrase ‘being there’ initially.”