Anodyne

Uncle Tupelo released what was to be their final album on October 5, 1993. By January of 1994, Jay Farrar had decided to leave the band. Anodyne is notable for numerous lyrics that foreshadow the dissolution of the Farrar/Jeff Tweedy partnership. Practically every line in every Farrar song is an explicit interpretation of a broken down relationship, and the record ends with his repeated line “No more will I see you.”

Uncle Tupelo would not make new music together again. Farrar would go on to form Son Volt, while Tweedy would take the remaining members of the band and form Wilco.

In Tweedy’s memoir “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)”, he wrote of their breakup:

“I started to put the pieces together, thinking back over the last year, and with hindsight, it all seemed so obvious. Some of the clues were right there in the songs. I thought ‘Chickamauga’ was about a Civil War battlefield, and maybe it mostly was, but there was another layer that was clearly foreshadowing. ‘Solitude is where I’m bound.’ Ugh. How did I miss that? If the record was a conversation between us, I was all ‘We’ll get there eventually,’ and he was ‘The time is right for getting out while we still can.’”