Wilco to start their own record label

Wilco plan to launch their own record label, guitarist Nels Cline has revealed. After 15 years and seven albums with Warner Music, the band have quit Nonesuch to "strike out on [their] own". "I don't know the name of it," Cline told Express Night Out . "[Frontman] Jeff [Tweedy] and [manager] Tony Margherita are the masterminds, so I'm just cruising with what they want to do." Given that the band's last album was called Wilco (The Album), then Wilco (The Label) seems like an obvious moniker. But the label could also end up issuing things besides Wilco albums: there are plenty of band side-projects, from Tweedy's Loose Fur to Cline's own Nels Cline Singers. Wilco's intial plans are modest: a 7in single for the festival they are curating. Following this, they will start recording their next album in August. "The process of making the next Wilco record is going to be long in terms of the writing, arranging and demoing phase," Cline said. "I think we'd love to make a really uptempo alienating record ... but the natural course of music-making precludes that. When things start to take form naturally, you kind of have to honour that. There may be ballads ... [but] you can guarantee a fair quotient at least of some form of rock." Wilco's decision to leave Nonesuch is a surprise. The label, an indie subset of Warner Music, rescued the band from the wilderness after Reprise, another Warner subsidiary, decided Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was too experimental to release. The album went on to be a hit.