The summer is but three weeks old, but Monday night’s Wilco concert in Coney Island will go down as the singular highlight of the season.
Jeff Tweedy’s band blistered through a 27-song set of tunes that leaned heavily on Wilco’s most-recent albums, including “Handshake Drugs” and “At Least That’s What You Said (both off “A Ghost is Born”), “Impossible Germany” (from “Sky Blue Sky”), “Jesus, etc” and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” (from “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”) and “Deeper Down” (from the eponymous new LP).
But longtime fans got plenty of attention, including “Shot in the Arm,” “I Can’t Stand It” and “I’m Always in Love” (from the 1999 album, “Summerteeth”).
Tweedy opened with “Wilco (the Song),” off the new album — an appropriate choice given that its lyrics promise, “Are times getting tough?/Are the roads you travel rough?/Have you had enough of the old?/Tired of being exposed to the cold? Wilco will love you. Wilco will love you, baby.”
Some of the cheekiness of the song also carried through in Tweedy’s banter from the stage at Keyspan Park. Given that the stadium is mostly used as the home field of the Brooklyn Cyclones, Tweedy led the crowd in an impromptu version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
He also chatted up a few fans in the front row, but when the fans started talking back, Tweedy joked that all requests had to go through “that guy over there.”
“Take Me Out to the Ballgame” wasn’t the only cover of the night. The two-and-a-half-hour show ended with a Woody Guthrie song, “Hoodoo Voodoo,” which featured the singer Feist.
Opening act Yo La Tengo also appeared onstage, joining the rendition of “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” a rocker from “A Ghost is Born.”
