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Jay Bennett, the incredibly talented multi-instrumentalist / songwriter / producer and former member of my favorite band, Wilco, passed away yesterday in Urbana, where his studio Pieholden Suites was located. He was Jeff Tweedy's main collaborator in the band until he was famously fired in 2001 shortly after finishing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, as documented in Sam Jones's film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. He was in the news recently for suing Tweedy, which at first seemed like a bitter swipe at his former band's success, but soon looked instead like a move of desperation to pay for the hip replacement surgery he needed to have but couldn't afford due to lack of health insurance.

A lot of people are under the opinion that the band went to shit after Jay left. I don't totally agree, as I really love the dense, layered guitar-based turn they've taken with the incredible Nels Cline in the band now. But I think Jay Bennett can take a lot of the credit of elevating Wilco from a pretty good alt-country band to one of the most innovative bands of the last fifteen years. He was a brilliant instrumentalist and was responsible for the blissful Brian Wilson-esque pop sound of Summerteeth and its noisier followup YHF, which for my money stands alongside Pet Sounds as the most perfect record ever committed to tape.

I re-watched I Am Trying to Break Your Heart last night, and it's not particularly kind to Bennett. He comes across as passive-aggressive, arrogant, and at times even delusional. But I looked at him much more sympathetically on this viewing, perhaps because I saw so much of myself in him. In the infamous argument shown between him and Tweedy about the mixing of "Heavy Metal Drummer," his frustration at not being able to verbalize his thoughts, his resistance to an approach other than the one he had planned, his desperate desire to have his argument be understood and accepted as rational — it all feels so very familiar. While of course I'd love to have the lyrical ability of Jeff Tweedy, musically it's Jay Bennett's pop wizardry I most want to achieve.

Here are a couple of songs Bennett and Tweedy collaborated on during the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions which were never officially released on a Wilco record. I remember spending a long time as a 15-year-old trying to transcribe the lovely Jay Bennett chord progressions of "Venus Stop the Train":

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Wilco - Venus Stop the Train [mp3]

And here's Jay and Jeff together working through "Cars Can't Escape," from the I Am Trying to Break Your Heart special features: