Wilco’s Patrick Sansone on the ‘Southern weirdness’ that inspires his music

Seated behind a trove of vintage music gear onstage at the Temple Theater in Meridian, Miss., Patrick Sansone diligently worked the keys and strummed guitars to help bring arrangements of Wilco’s collage of shattered pop, twangy folk and squawking noise-rock to life in the century-old venue.

As they plowed through a 22-song, career-spanning set, the band churned like a machine. Since Sansone joined two years earlier, expanding the group to six members in a lineup that endures today, that’s exactly what Wilco had become. Their performance on that spring evening in 2006 even included a pair of as-yet-unreleased songs, documenting the band as it crested a new creative peak.

By then, Wilco likely could’ve sold out the 1,600-seat Moorish Revival theater on its own, but it helped to have a hometown ringer in the band. Near the end of the show, Sansone, back in Meridian for a one-night engagement, stepped to the lip of the stage and struck a pose with his guitar as singer Jeff Tweedy introduced him. Then, he swung his picking hand in a windmill worthy of Pete Townsend and led the band into the next tune.

That burst of celebration and exuberance was a long time coming. Since his days as a teen, falling in love with music and getting experience behind the mixing board at a local studio, Sansone’s path was sure to be wide and winding, and defined by his obsession with sound. 

“I always had a sense of restlessness and a sense of curiosity and dreaming about life beyond,” Sansone says, echoing the wanderlust he’s shared with generations of Mississippi musicians who have taken their talents to new zip codes. 

“In my dream world, I was living in London in the sixties and hanging out with The Beatles and The Who and The Kinks,” he says. “But as I got older, I started to realize just how unique of an experience I had. And so many of the great British rock and rollers that I idolized as a teenager, they all dreamed about Mississippi.”

Sansone’s own abilities flourished during his time at the University of Southern Mississippi, as he settled into a music scene he remembers as “this little bohemian bubble of Southern weirdness.” Inspired by post-punk Southern bands like R.E.M., who brought a literary weight and mystique to their music, Sansone took to the environment quickly.

“We were Southern weirdos, encouraging each other, egging each other on, having some friendly rivalries,” he says. “It was a very fertile situation.”

A lesser-heralded outpost of indie rock in the 1980s, Mississippi was home to many musicians on the cusp of achieving commercial success. Sansone was right in the mix, playing with Jimbo Mathus, who would go on to form Squirrel Nut Zippers, and drummer Glen Graham, who soon left for Los Angeles to join Blind Melon with two other Mississippi ex-pats.

But in the early nineties, while his friends were finding their own ways in the music business, Sansone chose to stay in Hattiesburg. It was comfortable, and like other pockets of the South, cheap. But a conversation with Graham, who was living in New Orleans after the death of Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon, convinced him to give the Crescent City a try.

“Things were shifting a little bit for me, and I just didn’t feel like Hattiesburg was working for me anymore,” he says. “He basically said, ‘You’re coming to New Orleans, and you can stay at my house until you get on your feet.’ That really changed things around for me.”

As Sansone’s creativity reemerged, he began working at Kingsway, the French Quarter studio owned by Daniel Lanois, where Blind Melon, Pearl Jam, U2, Bob Dylan and others recorded music. He also began crossing paths with John Stirratt, whom he first met during his college days. Stirratt had played with Cary Hudson in The Hilltops, a precursor to Blue Mountain, and then joined Uncle Tupelo. When that band split, he followed Tweedy to Wilco.

“He was living there in ‘95, ‘96, ‘97, this era when I was there,” he says, “and we kept running into each other. We realized we were listening to a lot of the same things at the same time, which was a bit unique at that time, especially in New Orleans.”

A love of bands like Big Star, the long-unsung Memphis power-pop pioneers, as well as early-seventies Laurel Canyon folk singers and soft-rockers like Bread led the pair to collaborate in a new project they dubbed The Autumn Defense. During Stirratt’s breaks from Wilco, the duo recorded their first album, 2001’s The Green Hour, between New Orleans and Nashville, where Sansone moved at the turn of the century.

While they were on tour together playing shows in support of The Autumn Defense’s second album, Circles, Stirratt began to hint that Tweedy was interested in adding Sansone to the Wilco roster. By then, he had migrated to New York and was establishing himself as a producer and free agent who could hop on a recording session at any time. He wasn’t looking to join another band.  

“Obviously, it was a great opportunity, and I knew it would give me the ability to travel and play for bigger audiences and all of the things that it did,” he says. “But there was some back and forth inside about it.” 

Sansone chose wisely — he not only became an integral utility player in Wilco, earning a co-producer credit on the band’s adventurous 2011 album The Whole Love, but now had the same schedule as Stirratt. When Wilco wasn’t touring or recording at the Loft, the group’s headquarters in Chicago, they kept the calendar packed with shows and sessions for The Autumn Defense, releasing three albums between 2007 and 2014. Their sixth album, Here and Nowhere, released this month, arrived after an 11-year lull in new music.

Sansone used some of that break to cultivate other creative outlets. In 2010, he published his first book of photography, “100 Polaroids,” in a limited run. The collection, which drew comparisons to beloved photographer William Eggleston, among others, showcased his eye for intriguing reflections of Americana, and particularly the Southern kind. 

He took to the road again during the COVID pandemic, this time with 35mm and medium-format film, and began documenting the faded glory of empty storefronts and scenes of small towns throughout the rural South. Many of those photographs recently surfaced in “Noticings,” his second book of photography, released in April.

“It was like a meditation driving around with my cameras, being open and being present and just letting my eye wander and be drawn to whatever it wants to be drawn to without too much analysis or judgment,” he says. “It’s mysterious to me, too, and that’s part of what I love about it: the stillness, the quiet of just being alone with my cameras and off the beaten path.”

In recent years, he’s also toured in the Big Star Quintet, a tribute to his teenage heroes featuring original Big Star drummer and lone surviving member Jody Stephens alongside Mike Mills of R.E.M. and members of the Posies and the dBs. And he hosts Baroque Down Palace, a radio show on WYXR-FM in Memphis (it also airs on MPB Radio on Saturdays at 1 p.m.) that takes its name from the 1970 Grateful Dead song “Brokedown Palace,” where he blends hits and deep cuts from the 1960s and 1970s that incorporate symphonic or classical influences.

After his homecoming back in 2006, Sansone celebrated with his family — Tony Sansone, his father, booked the show — and many of the people he’d known growing up in an upstairs room at Weidmann’s Restaurant a few blocks from the theater. Surrounded by friends past and present, more than ever he grew to appreciate growing up in an artistic family and a place that has contributed so much to culture through art and music.

“Feelings about home are always complicated, but I see so much richness and beauty and complexity and depth in the place that I’m from,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t really recognize what’s happening around you until you’ve got some distance from it.”