Here's more about "Less Than You Think"--taken from Learning How to Die--the book about Wilco I mentioned on the first page.
=======================================
"Less Than You Think" is "the track that everyone will hate," Tweedy says with a laugh, arriving like an uninvited guest near the end of what is the most straightforward, tradition-bound Wilco record since Being There. "I know ninety-nine percent of our fans won't like that song, that they'll say it's a ridiculous indulgence. Even I don't want to listen to it every time I play through the album. But the times I do calm myself down and pay attention to it, I think it's valuable and moving and cathartic. I wouldn't have put it on the record if I didn't think it was great. We've been doing sound installations like that for the last couple of years in the loft to amuse ourselves, and there's something beautiful about making music that doesn't have any author. Nobody 'plays' anything, and it goes hand in hand with the notion that 'there is so much less to this than you think.' I wanted to make an album about identity, and within that is the idea of a higher power, the idea of randomness, and that anything can happen, and that we can't control it."
========================================
The "sound installations" used to make "LTYT" were described earlier:
"What had once been the briefest moment in the Wilco songbook becomes its longest recorded work, a fifteen-minute epic, thanks to an extended coda that consists entirely of various electronic contraptions and synthesizers oscillating through a series of effects boxes -- Wilco's answer to Lou Reed's experiment in drone, "Metal Machine Music." Each band member created his own sound installation in the studio, then let it run unattended. In the mixing afterward, the noise was sculpted into a slow-moving arch that peaks, then fades, the poltergeist of the album title shrieking to life and then drifting out of the room."
