Jesus, Etc.

Tweedy wrote the words and the music with Jay Bennett, and the band recorded it at The Loft in Chicago with Kotche, Stirratt, Bach and Bennett. Tweedy said it was one of the first songs of the new line-up and came together very quickly, and that it was one of the few Kotche recordings that was not a new approach to an older song. He and Stirratt worked out the string arrangement, and he doubted that anyone trained in such things would think it good. Bennett said the song began as Jesus Don't Cry, and that the new name stuck after he wrote the shorter title on a CD label to save time.

Its images of tall buildings shaking and skyscrapers scraping together were written before 11 September 2001 but heard afterwards as an echo of it, and Tweedy acknowledged eerie echoes of that day across the album. Nonesuch sent it to radio as a promotional single in 2002. Pitchfork ranked it the 61st best song of the 2000s, Stereogum's Chris DeVille heard a balance between the Eagles and Steve Reich, and American Songwriter called it a rightful Wilco standard.

Live

First played at First Avenue in Minneapolis on 29 June 2001, it is the band's second most played song, with more than 1,180 Wilco performances on setlist.fm. Live versions appear on Kicking Television and on the 2002 Pageant show in the Super Deluxe set. Norah Jones covered it at the Bridge School Benefit in October 2008 and joined Wilco on it at Madison Square Garden that December.

Jones recorded it again with Puss n Boots, and Tweedy told her she had changed the lyrics and that it was cool. Bill Fay made it a piano ballad, and Gamblers built a track on a loop from it before replacing the sample with their own playing. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.