Though Wilco is basically a conventional rock band in form — guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, one lead songwriter — it defies expectations in so many other ways. In 2001, the group put an entire new album (the instant classic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) online for all to hear; it’s one thing to do that in 2015, as Wilco did with Star Wars, but it was virtually unheard-of in 2001.

This is a deeply imaginative band, with evocative imagery and relatable storytelling; drummer Glenn Kotche is one of the best around, while Nels Cline‘s crazy, textured guitar layers add adventure to everything he touches. I could go on, but let’s just say that breaking my rule of never bringing a band back to the Tiny Desk — Wilco performed here back in 2011 — was easy once I heard Star Wars.

Wilco opened this set with “The Joke Explained” from that album, but then dug deep into its catalog, performing 1996’s “Misunderstood” and two songs from the 1999 pop masterpiece Summerteeth. I’m thinking we make a date: When Wilco turns 25 in a few years, let’s break more rules and bring back their magic once more.

Star Wars is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon)

Set List

• “The Joke Explained”
• “Misunderstood”
• “I’m Always In Love”
• “Shot In The Arm”

Credits

Producers: Bob Boilen, Niki Walker; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Niki Walker, Kara Frame, Becky Lettenberger; Production Assistant: Ben de la Cruz; Photo: Brandon Chew/NPR.

For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Now based in New York, Harrison has a career that includes playing with a big band, writing chamber jazz, wildly reimagining old country songs and composing for string quartets.

Where does that adventurous spirit come from? “It’s how I hear things, how I was put together as a person and just how I’ve wanted to do things,” says Harrison, who performs two shows in the D.C. area this weekend.

On his latest album, Mother Stump — out now on Silver Spring label Cuneiform Records — Harrison steps out even more than usual. “It’s probably my most freewheeling record to date, in terms of playing more rock and blues,” he says.

In the past, Harrison has relied more heavily on his compositional skills, and he typically featured other players as primary soloists. But this most recent LP felt different. “I have something I can do on guitar,” Harrison says. “I’ve never made a record where I featured myself — I just wanted to have fun.”

The album rips to life with opener “John The Revelator,” offering plenty of room for Harrison to flex his warped-but-refined chops.

“The [guitar] solo reaches a fever pitch, and I start scratching the strings with a metal spring,” says Harrison, describing an abrasive, euphoric climax that might impress the late Lou Reed.

Musicians with such diverse interests and talents don’t have many peers, but Harrison — who earned a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship for his work — says his longtime friend Nels Cline explores similarly vast territory on the guitar. The two met in the 1970s, made a record together in the ’90s, and last year Cline performed at Harrison’s annual Alternative Guitar Summit, showcasing lesser-known instrumentalists. (Cline now supports his appetite for sonic adventure with a role in rock band Wilco — a steady gig Harrison admits “would be nice.”)

Scroll down to hear a playlist of Joel Harrison’s influences, peers, mentors and collaborators.

Harrison’s two divergent local shows this weekend suit his heterogenous palate. Saturday at JV’s in Falls Church, Virginia, he plays a set with Cuneiform labelmate Anthony Pirog, the local composer Harrison describes as “a kindred spirit… and an important up-and-coming figure.” He plans to tear through rockabilly, blues and roots music, backed by members of Danny Gatton’s old rhythm section.

Focusing more on jazz and his recent Mother Stump arrangements, Harrison performs two sets at U Street club Bohemian Caverns Sunday. He’ll be accompanied by a fellow D.C. native, drummer Allison Miller (who’s worked with Ani DiFranco, Natalie Merchant and Brandi Carlile), and bassist Michael Bates (who cites both Bad Brains and Joni Mitchell as influences).

Working with Cuneiform Records on Mother Stump was no accident. While watching Danny Gatton play, hanging out at Fort Reno, studying jazz with Bill Harris of The Clovers and even jamming with Root Boy Slim (“a true character,” Harrison says), much of the guitarist’s musical identity formed during his years around D.C. It only made sense to work with a D.C.-area label to highlight those roots.

Much like Harrison’s prior work, Mother Stump pulls from disparate sources — many local, this time around — to grasp at something greater.

“The type of deep connections I feel and try to make through music are what making life worth living for me,” says Harrison. “So I just keep trying to find that space.”

Joel Harrison performs with Anthony Pirog, John Previti and Jack O’Dell at 9 p.m. March 28 at JV’s in Falls Church and 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. March 29 at Bohemian Caverns in D.C.

YouTube playlist: Joel Harrison’s influences, peers, mentors and collaborators

Also read: A Critic’s Guide to Cuneiform Records, parts 1 and 2

But with the advent of electronics, the possibilities for tweaking the sound of one instrument exploded. And perhaps nobody has done more tweaking than electric guitarists.

Sitting in his Bethel, Conn., workshop, pedal maker Mike Piera plugs in a vintage electric guitar and demonstrates what a fuzz box can do by playing part of Cream’s “Sunshine Of Your Love.”

“Without the pedal, you just kinda get a dead sound,” Piera says. “Pretty boring.”

The box makes the guitar sound fuzzy by distorting its sound. This is something musicians have been intentionally trying to do since the earliest days of amplification. Many credit the first deliberately distorted electric guitar to Johnny Burnette’s Rock ‘n Roll Trio in 1956.

Two years later, Link Wray claimed he’d stabbed a hole in the speaker of his amp when he challenged listeners to a “Rumble.”

Others said they got the sound by dislodging a tube in their amps. Then, in 1962, a Nashville engineer named Glen Snoddy invented the box that came to be called the Maestro Fuzz-Tone, marketed by Gibson.

An ad for the Fuzz-Tone proclaims: “It’s mellow. It’s raucous. It’s tender. It’s raw. It’s the Maestro Fuzz-Tone. You have to hear this completely different sound effect for the guitar to believe it!”

The concept was simple: plug your guitar into one, tap it with your foot, and presto, your sound goes from squeaky clean to downright dirty. Guitarist and historian Tom Wheeler says Keith Richards was after something very specific when he took the Fuzz-Tone to the top of the charts with The Rolling Stones.

“If you’re Keith Richards and you’re doing ‘Satisfaction,’ you could play that line on a clean guitar, but it just would not have that in-your-face, gnarly, dark quality that has so much attitude to it,” he says.

Fuzz soon became central to the sound of many of the era’s greats. It’s still hot with today’s guitarists, including Nels Cline of Wilco.

“I started dabbling with an electric guitar at age 11 or 12, and the first thing I wanted to do was play with fuzz,” Cline says.

Why? “To get away from the inherent sound of the guitar,” Cline says. “To transform it, but also go back to it when I wanted to just by pushing down on a button on the floor.”

To meet the growing demand for sonic manipulation, engineers started coming up with new effects, such as the wah-wah and the talk box. For guitarists like Cline, the explosion allowed for greater experimentation.

“I started thinking about effects pedals as being like a palette with different colors — using delay, volume pedal, sometimes distortion but not a lot, just to sound like many different guitarists and many different kinds of voices within the music,” Cline says.

Today, stores like New York’s Ludlow Guitars carry an ever-changing selection of effects pedals. Ludlow sells nearly a thousand varieties, which account for about half its overall sales. Co-owner Kaan Howell explains the enduring appeal.

“It’s all really based in tradition, I find,” he says. “If you like rock ‘n’ roll, and you like The Ramones or you like Led Zeppelin, they don’t play clean. If you want to emulate and do something along the same vein, you have to start trying out effects pedals.”

At the same time, Howell says, effects pedals also allow guitarists to experiment.

“It’s a real sort of alchemy lesson in trying to create a sound,” Howell says. “What you like will be just a little different than what other people like. And so if you do take the time to try stuff, the sound you’ll create will be just a little different than things that are out there.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A new chorus begins in orderly fashion, but before it gets very far, the vocals are eclipsed by unexpectedly menacing electric guitars. All snarls and daggers, these rise from background to foreground like a fast-growing audio fungus, threatening to obliterate everything else. The brief outbreak is followed by a fadeout, but it’s not one of those mellow Laurel Canyon-at-dusk affairs; for a while, Tweedy’s voice soldiers earnestly on amid the fitful anarchy of razor-wire guitar antics, vying for attention. As the music evaporates, there’s the sense that the struggle is ongoing; that if we were magically able to fade things back up, we’d hear Tweedy’s incantation “only a world away” further obscured by a spastic lo-fi freakout that hails from three noisy worlds over.

It’s brief, this interlude, but revealing. It suggests that Tweedy and his drummer son Spencer, 18, embraced an improvisational, whatever-works ethos during the recording of the thoroughly surprising Sukierae. Jeff Tweedy is known to be somewhat fanatical about the structures, melodies, and other compositional elements of his songs; he’s capable of proferring an exuberant and entirely credible update of girl-group pop and then, in the next song, lace up his boots and kick out a punishing update of ’70s arena rock. Only it’s better and smarter than it would be in virtually any other hands.

Sukierae contains some wry and characteristically compact Tweedy gems. Overall, though, it achieves a rare balance between songwriterly preciousness and reckless, heat-of-the-moment lunges. The songs fall across a range of styles and moods; there are playful soft-shoe numbers in the style of “Mr. Bojangles,” and tunes with tricky progressive-rock groove changes, and disarmingly tender moments, too. Many of them have episodes like the one in “World Away” where the universal order is abruptly jumbled. In these moments, when savvy listeners might expect a typical pop-song resolution, there’s instead a leap into the unknown. Later, maybe, there’s a return to order. And maybe not. The uncertainty acts as a lure, pulling you in to see what happens next.

Jeff Tweedy has described his writing process as a piecing together of fragments, a connecting of disassociated parts. Often, he and Spencer start with a slight riff, then go off exploring with little in the way of an organizing agenda. Sometimes, they hew close to the spirit of the initial idea; sometimes, they wind up in a different time zone. The thrilling “Diamond Light, Part 1” is an example of the latter: It opens with a pulse-pounding drum pattern, then switches to half-time for a shadowy vocal, then unfolds into spectacularly beautiful expanses of instrumental dissonance that show the influence of Wilco lead guitarist Nels Cline. It’s not hyperbole to say that in moments like this, the Tweedy band takes more musical chances than any similar father-son or family band in rock history.

Inevitably, Wilco-like turns of phrase are scattered throughout these songs, their verses riddled with inscrutable codes and references. At the same time, Sukierae finds Jeff Tweedy communicating in more direct ways, his words perhaps reflecting what both he and Spencer have described as a low-key music-making process. Other events in the Tweedy household could easily have affected the tenor of the narratives: During the recording process, Sue (Jeff’s wife, Spencer’s mom) received a complex cancer diagnosis and began treatment. It’s always dangerous to speculate about the relationship between real life and song lyrics, but many of these songs go right at big questions about mortality and devotion, honor and commitment, what it means to confront (or even momentarily fret about) the prospect of losing a loved one. Running through these songs are great and graceful affirmations of love, carnal and familial, and right alongside them is pronounced old-soul wistfulness and a healthy dose of doubt. At times, it seems as though Tweedy’s at a loss, and can offer little more than his own confusion. Then, at other moments, he’s eager to share what he’s learned from recent introspection, and his clarity is striking. “It’s not how they tell it, it’s not how they say,” he sings with earnest, breathy intimacy in “Slow Love.” “Your heart’s in your mind and your mind’s in the way.”

That’s one of the things that’s most striking about Sukierae: Its resonance comes from a pronounced ease of expression. There’s not much contrivance, not much high-concept, just a dad and his son bashing out tunes. It’s the rare chance to follow one of rock’s thinkers as he goes off wandering without a map or a professional care about the results — crucially, without his mind getting in the way.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.