Wilco Had the Miami Beach Fillmore on Its Feet

I got a little worried when I stepped down onto the floor at the Fillmore Tuesday night and saw it was filled with folding chairs. The night's featured entertainment, Chicago-based Wilco, is known to play a pretty song or two, but much of the band's beloved catalogue goes in unpredictable directions. Wilco sounds aren't ever heavy enough to instigate a mosh pit, but crowds are known to abandon their seats from the get-go and after a beer or three, head bobbing, hand-waving, and hip-shaking are the norm.

Wilco has been around for 30 years, though. So maybe fans who've been following the band for all these decades could use a cushioned seat during a night out.

I needn't have fretted that this might be a sit-down show for a stand-up band. The throngs that filled the Fillmore stayed on their feet for all two dozen songs Wilco played over the course of two-plus hours, chairs be damned.

After Wilco's six members walked out onstage at 8:45, singer/songwriter/frontman Jeff Tweedy gave the audience a full bodied wave they got down to business with the 2004 ballad "Wishful Thinking."

"We got a lot of songs to play, so we're going to keep the chitchat to a minimum," Tweedy said. This statement was half correct, as Wilco did touch a lot of their musical history during this fourth stop on the band's 2025 tour, but the 57-year-old rocker still found time to squeeze in plenty of wry patter, at one point flattering us with, "This doesn't feel like a Tuesday-night crowd. [Pause.] Maybe Thursday?"
Whatever night of the week the Miami Beach crowd embodied, Wilco's rendition of "Handshake Drugs" quickened the tempo. The observational lyrics were cleanly sung, but this was the first track of the night to bring the cacophony of noise that they experimented with in the early part of the 2000s when they evolved from their original incarnation as an alt-country bar band that spun off from Uncle Tupelo, the originators of the phrase "No Depression." Things got even more anarchic during "Via Chicago," when the gentle, nostalgic vocals got interrupted with some wild, purposefully off-beat drumming. A majority of the night's set (including those two songs) came from Wilco's twin turn-of-the-century classics, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born.

The highlight of the night, though, might have been a song from their next record. Wilco transformed "Impossible Germany" into a ten-minute psychedelic freakout, during which virtuoso guitarist Nels Cline left no spot on his fretboard untouched as he shredded the solo. After that song, and 90 minutes into their set, Tweedy said, "We've got a lot more songs for you. I see some dates saying, 'Oh, no.'"
To be fair to the wary companions he mocked, a lot of music was packed into this night. Opener Waxahatchee serenaded early arrivers with 45 minutes of honkey-tonk tunes that edged the Americana border between rock and country. Katie Crutchfield, the Alabama mastermind behind Waxahatchee, was backed by a five-piece band that occasionally included a banjo and pedal steel guitar. Though she eschewed any stage spotlights, Crutchfield hit those high, twangy notes that almost could be described as yodeling and was lovingly received for it.

Song stylings aside, Wilco has dubbed the tour Wilco-hatchee, and Waxahatchee shares Wilco's DNA, quite literally: The drummer, Spencer Tweedy is Jeff Tweedy's son. Not surprising, then, that Tweedy père scolded the crowd during the headlining set for hollering an inappropriate request at the openers. "Someone yelled during Waxahatchee to play 'California Stars,' he chided. That was dumb. Waxahatchee is awesome. You shouldn't yell other people's songs at them."

No worries: The miscreant responsible for the faux pas had to wait until the end of the night, but "California Stars," a sweet favorite from Mermaid Avenue, Tweedy's famed 1998 collab with Billy Bragg that produced an album's worth of songs from a trove of lost Woody Guthrie's lyrics, ended Wilco's three-song encore.

Then the houselights came on and a sated crowd bestowed an ovation that was, naturally, standing.    

Setlist:
- "Wishful Thinking"
- "Evicted"
- "Handshake Drugs"
- "At Least That's What You Said"
- "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart"
- "Childlike and Evergreen"
- "Muzzle of Bees"
- "Whole Love"
- "Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull"
- "Via Chicago"
- "I Am My Mother"
- "Cruel Country"
- "Quiet Amplifier"
- "Impossible Germany"
- "Jesus, Etc."
- "Box Full of Letters"
- "Annihilation"
- "Heavy Metal Drummer"
- "I'm the Man Who Loves You"
- "Hummingbird"
Encore:
- "The Late Greats"
- "Falling Apart (Right Now)"
- "California Stars"