Watching Wilco play, just like listening to their music when alone, makes me think just one thing: Jeff Tweedy knows everything.Student Events' fall semester concert featured the recently re-vamped Wilco, a band credited with pioneering the alt-country genre. It is comprised of Tweedy (vocals and guitar), John Stirratt (bass), Jim O'Rourke and Nels Cline (guitar), Pat Sansone (multi-instrumentalist), and Glenn Kotche (drums.)

In Tweedy's world, concerts are still about sweating, voting iss cool and so are books.

Poetry and rock fused Saturday to create one of the best live shows I've ever seen- like intensity is the new nonchalance.

With much from their new album, A Ghost Is Born, including opener "Wishful Thinking," the band proves their nuanced attention to harmony and musical precision. The performance sounded equal to or better than the corresponding album cuts. The songs I tentatively enjoyed before came into their own in the live setting; most of A Ghost Is Born's guitar riffs, heavy bass and drums make much more sense in a live show. This builds an intense personal connection, and the band looks like they're having fun, like they've made those choices for a reason, that reason being: to rock. Covering a majority of A Ghost Is Born, highlights included "Hell is Chrome," "Hummingbird," "Theologians," "Handshake Drugs," "I'm A Wheel," "The Late Greats," and "Company in My Back."

Tweedy's lyrics are as strong as ever on this album, each acting as a glimpse into a different mood - from despair to the rationalization of hope, he toys with the ideas of love, death, remembrance, identity, even the concept of a higher power.

The band also covered some of their most popular classics, such as "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," "War on War," "Jesus, Etc." and "A Shot in the Arm," with next to flawless delivery. The crowd, a significant portion of which seemed to be from outside of Brandeis, seemed to be feeling the energy along with the band. And I apologize to the kid whose back I was kind of drumming on.

The show was high-energy for most of the duration, as if Wilco's alt-country label doesn't fit quite as nicely as it used to, or maybe convey their ability to carry a crowd whose libraries probably don't include much other country. But also present is Tweedy's trademark ability to sing with a quiet emotion, almost subtle desperation that's rarely expressed in music that doesn't sound whiny or self-indulgent.

It's songs like "Wishful Thinking," or "Reservations" that epitomize my favorite element of Wilco's live performance - that something obviously personal and emotional can suddenly seem even more so, even in a gym with a horde of strangers pissed at you for singing along. The physical act of watching a man so devoted, whose voice turns on a tremble and yet never falters, is both opposed to and inextricably linked with the idea of sharing it with a crowd of strangers.

And so I reiterate-despite my glaring partiality-that Tweedy only speaks truth, even though he may seem distant or reserved. Maybe he's just trying to tell us that, "there's so much less to this than you think." He has to ability to wax intellectual, in "Theologians" or "Wishful Thinking," with lyrics quasi-resigned or possibly too honest for popular America:

"Fill up your mind with all it can know \ Don't forget that your body will let it all go."

But to me Tweedy's voice is like a glimpse into the big joke; that it's all a facade or a grandly simple music metaphor that we should have picked up on by now: "Is any song worth singing / If it doesn't help."

He seems to touch on the hopelessness of life, a resigned dejection that attempts to spin itself into something musical, poetic and able to get us through the day. It's this note that Wilco chooses to end on, after an awesome encore upping their playing time to around two hours.

In the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Tweedy plays Bill Fay's "Be Not So Fearful" quietly before a show, trying to calm his nerves. And it's here in the final songs of the encore that we see, even if Tweedy knows everything, that everyone, including the most perfect man alive, needs music to say that everything's gonna be OK, or at least OK enough until tomorrow.