Night 1 puts Wilco on track to play 90-plus songs in three-night St. Paul run

Friday's concert left plenty of popular tunes on the table for the rest of the band's no-repeat weekend at the Palace Theatre.

By Chris Riemenschneider Star Tribune

December 14, 2024 — 9:17am

At the end of Wilco's concert Friday night at the Palace Theatre, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy asked how many attendees were returning Saturday.

"Good," he said after a loud cheer, "because otherwise it wouldn't make sense doing all these songs."

Thirty-one of those songs were offered on Night 1. The opening stretch in a sold-out three-night marathon at the rugged St. Paul theater with no opening acts, Friday's show lasted 2½ hours not counting a 15-minute intermission — half of which it took just for fans to file out of the ultra-packed general-admission floor to get to the bathrooms and bar lines.

None of the tunes performed Friday will be played again Saturday or Sunday. An idea Tweedy's experimental twang-rock sextet has pulled off in prior years as a home-for-the-holidays celebration in Chicago, the locally beloved band is billing its year-ending run at the Palace — where it also pulled two prior three-nighters in 2017 and 2019 — as a no-repeat weekend. That means Wilco will have performed 90-plus songs by the time it wraps things up Sunday, assuming Friday's show set the precedent.

Tweedy's crew certainly left plenty of fan favorites on the table after digging deep into its discography the first night.

Friday's setlist included a lot of lesser-played album cuts, some B-sides and recent material that hasn't yet been performed in the Twin Cities (the band's last area show was at Treasure Island Casino Amphitheater with Trampled by Turtles in 2021). Foremost among the latter batch were songs off the 2022 double album "Cruel Country," including one of the night's wildest and jammiest numbers, "Bird Without a Tail/Base of My Skull," which finished off the first set before intermission.

Tweedy played an inordinate amount of acoustic guitar on Friday. Lead guitarist Nels Cline only cut loose with his electrifying solos a few times — most notably early in the second set during "You Satellite" (from the 2015 album "Star Wars").

Fans attending the next two nights can probably expect things to get louder, heavier and jammier. They can't expect to hear "Misunderstood," "Heavy Metal Drummer," "Box Full of Letters" or "A Shot in the Arm," though. Those were among the more popular songs dropped on opening night.

Look for a review of Wilco's three-night run following Sunday's finale. Here's a rundown of Friday's setlist.