Wilco — 6 May 2026, Lubbock, TX (Buddy Holly Hall Of Performing Arts And Sciences)

Well, I must admit that I didn’t have the highest of hopes for this show in Lubbock. All of the ingredients were in place for a bit of a dud: Wilco’s first-ever appearance somewhere, a fancy new-ish hall with reserved seating that was maybe half sold, a mid-week gig by a veteran band coming to the end of a tour and playing its third gig in three nights in three different states.

But to quote a common sportsball cliché, that’s why they play the games. Or to mention a not-played-often-enough Wilco song, which indeed wasn’t played, You Never Know.

There’s just something about Lubbock. It produced one of the pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll, Buddy Holly, who is buried there (his grave is easily visited) and whose name adorns any number of important landmarks around town. Not far from where Holly is buried lies the grave of country music star Mac Davis, and other country performers with Lubbock roots include Waylon Jennings and Natalie Maines (of The Chicks). Terry Allen also hails from the West Texas city and his great 1979 double album Lubbock (On Everything) — seriously, do yourself a favor if you haven’t heard it — pays tribute to his hometown.

With such a musical tradition, it’s pretty hard to believe that Wilco had never made it to Lubbock in all its years of touring. Maybe there wasn’t a good place for Jeff and Co. to play before — or any place. The gleaming Buddy Holly Hall, which cost $158 million to build and opened in early 2021, probably wasn’t the ideal fit for a rock show and Wilco didn’t come close to filling the more than 2,200 seats in its main hall, the Helen DeVitt Jones Theatre (two of the three balconies, for example, didn’t even appear to be open.) But it was certainly a room that figured to at least have great acoustics, if a somewhat sterile atmosphere.

Of course, in keeping with the theme of everything isn’t as it seems, the room wound up having a fun, almost rowdy atmosphere (due largely to a very vocal audience). The acoustics, meanwhile, were probably great at certain points in the theater, but up front at least, it lacked some oomph in places. I’m not an acoustic expert, by any stretch, but if you weren’t right in the line of a fill monitor, say, it just sounded a tad muffled.

Nevertheless, Jeff and his bandmates embraced the setting and the crowd from the start. A couple of songs into the show, Jeff invited anyone sitting further back to come and fill the probably 30 or so empty seats in the “pit” section (essentially the first few rows). “Feel free, if you want, to come up and we can be a little closer,” he said, as more than a few folks definitely took him up on the offer. Then after a couple of songs, he clarified it by adding, “I just want to say if you came down and you’re sitting in someone else’s seat, be cool. Even if they’re late, they deserve respect. You could probably just slide over (to another empty seat).”

As the crowd gradually warmed up, the connection to the band began to get stronger and stronger. Jeff even sensed it, commenting after Country Song Upside-Down, “You’ve been so nice to us. It’s our first time in Lubbock. You know how rare that is for this band after a thousand years (of touring)? We didn’t know if you were gonna love us or not.” Then he briefly referred to a girl in the front row at the previous night’s show in Oklahoma City. “We were her first concert. Beethoven was our first concert,” Jeff quipped.

The audience, for its part, seemed to feel increasingly comfortable yelling anything and everything at the band, so much so that Jeff even remarked at one point how he didn’t think they would need to go around at the end of the night one by one to hear every person’s take on the show — one of his tactics to deal with vocal audience members — because everyone had already gotten their say. He also said before the end of Set 1, “Is this a Wednesday night? You have a solid Friday night energy, I have to tell you.”

At one point, one guy made his request for banjo clearly known until Jeff set him straight by informing him that “there’s no banjo in our current touring package. If someone wants to get a banjo for us, we’ll probably do…something with it.” A more successful audience request came from some sweet-looking teenagers in the second row who collectively held up three pieces of paper on which were written “She’s A Jar.” Jeff spotted them as he was leaving the stage for the intermission, and he sort of shrugged his shoulders and mouthed “maybe” at them. I knew they were probably going to get their request, though, when the Wilcrew had to replace the setlists they had already taped down for the second set, and indeed, seven songs in, Jeff put on his harmonica rack for the only time this whole tour and played the Summerteeth tune (and we won’t even hold it against him that he accidentally left out half a verse). It was a sweet moment, and the kids looked pretty psyched that their gambit had actually worked.

“That was a request,” Jeff said afterward. “We haven’t played that one in a long time.” (In fact it had been about 18 months since the last full-band She’s A Jar, and outside of a couple of times at the very start of the “Evening With…” format in December 2024, the full band hadn’t played the song since one of the Iceland shows in 2023.) Naturally, the mention of requests caused a number of other folks to yell out their desired songs. But Jeff nipped that in the bud. “Oh, don’t get any ideas,” he said. “We only do one request (per show).”

It was just before this that most of the crowd finally relented for some reason — perhaps the familiarity of I Am Trying To Break Your Heart — and stood up. As the show barreled toward its inevitable conclusion, there were a couple of other noteworthy visits to Banter Corner, including one involving a “Wilco! Wilco!” chant that broke out after Jesus, etc., which Jeff half-jokingly called “not very pleasant. It sounds angry. Disjointed.” Of course a couple of songs later, Jeff started up the chant himself before joking, “That didn’t feel natural because I started it. … Bruce (Springsteen) doesn’t start the ‘Bruuuuuuuce’ chant. That would be lame.” Then after a spirited run through the Southern rock version of Kingpin — in which he changed the lyric to “livin’ in…Lubbock” — Jeff thanked the crowd again. “We’ve had a great time,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll be back sooner than never.”

By the encore, Jeff was clearly in a pretty chatty, playful mood. He made one more suggestion before he and his bandmates launched into the show-closing rock two-fer of I Got You (At The End Of The Century) and Outtasite (Outta Mind). “Just for fun, if we come back next time and sell the same number of tickets, everybody should only sit up top,” Jeff said. “It would be fun to see what a different energy that would be — but let’s not do that now.” Here’s hoping that Wilco will make it back to Lubbock before too long, since there clearly is some sort of audience for the band in the West Texas flatlands. Whether it would be bigger the next time (or equally energetic), well, I guess that remains to be seen.

Here was the complete setlist, as played (only got a look at a printed setlist for Set 2, and there were no changes/omissions from that):

Set 1

1. Via Chicago

2. Handshake Drugs

3. If I Ever Was A Child

4. Cruel Country

5. Forget The Flowers

6. Evicted

7. Bird Without A Tail/Base Of My Skull

8. I’m Always In Love (acoustic arrangement)

9. Spiders (Kidsmoke) (acoustic arrangement)

10. Hummingbird

11. It’s Just That Simple

12. You And I

13. Country Song Upside-Down

14. War On War

15. Falling Apart (Right Now)

16. California Stars

Set 2

17. Box Full Of Letters

18. Annihilation

19. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

20. Kamera

21. Either Way

22. Impossible Germany

23. She’s A Jar

24. Jesus, etc.

25. The Universe (electric arrangement)

26. Hate It Here

27. Walken

28. Kingpin

29. Heavy Metal Drummer>

30. I’m The Man Who Loves You

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Encore

31. The Late Greats

32. I Got You (At The End Of The Century)>

33. Outtasite (Outta Mind)