It’s back. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Been a month and a few weeks but I think I’m ready to come back to this. Nothing much has changed. I did pass my driving test at the end of January though. Six months of driving lessons that led up to it. I’m a grand less in wealth than I was before. But at least it’s all over now. This thing just continues to carry on though. And it’s time for the K’s. Like ‘J’, there aren’t a lot of songs to write about beginning with ‘K’ too. It just depends on how I’m feeling whether I can get these out on a regular schedule.

And so to kick it all off is ‘Kamera’, the second track from Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Remembering the time the track really clicked for me, I’d returned home at about 12pm after sleeping round a friend’s house after a birthday party. Got to my house, mother left for work, and I decided to listen to ‘Yankee’ on Spotify. So there I was, hungover, lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling with my headphones on and having an existential crisis when the noise that ends the album’s first track suddenly ended and the acoustic guitars for ‘Kamera’ came in.

The song is understated in its delivery and aesthetic. After seven minutes of ‘I Am Trying to Break Your Heart’, an ambitious opener that ends in a collage of noise, ‘Kamera’ arrives as a straight up acoustic-driven alt-rock tune. As the song goes on, it subtly builds and layers are added. Pretty synthesizer flourishes and keyboard melodies appear here and there interplaying with Jeff Tweedy’s vocal. The backing harmony vocals appear out of nowhere and only for a brief period in the final verse. Jeff Tweedy also double tracks his lower main vocal with one in a higher register in that last part too. Its ending seems to loop forever as the acoustic guitars play a climbing riff alongside a (I want to say) glockenspiel that plays a downward scale. And then just as the band get ready to play the last few chords, there’s a small ‘beep’ that appears to signify their cue to wrap things up.

I didn’t notice all of this when I was on the sofa that time. I think then, I was engaged by how happy it sounded even though there’s a hint of sadness to it that I can’t quite grasp. Several listens to it since then has revealed just how much goes on this song. It has become one of my favourites from the album after years of not caring that much about it.