North Coast Journal out of Humboldt County, California, asked some of the area's music mavens for their picks of the year's best. Gini Noggle, owner of the local record shop Metro, says Wilco's Sky Blue Sky is her favorite. "I fell in love with this CD," she says. "I have played it every day at work since it came out this summer (I’m not kidding) and it still sounds fresh every time. Jeff Tweedy could sing the phone book and I’d be riveted, his voice is that good."

Wilco will be on hand when Australia's award-winning Byron Bay Blues Festival makes its way across the Tasman Sea to launch a New Zealand offshoot in 2008 called BluesfestNZ (aka the Coromandel Peninsula Blues and Roots Music Festival 2008). The band will be joining the line-up for the inaugural event as part of its March 2008 tour of Australia and New Zealand.

Wilco's Sky Blue Sky has made the Best of 2007 list from WFUV, 90.9 FM, in New York. "Another great album from Wilco," writes WFUV's music director, Rita Houston, "Sky Blue Sky doesn't hit a wrong note."

Alex Ross, the New Yorker's classical music critic, has posted on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, his Apex 07 list—some of the best performances and recordings he's heard this year. Among the best on CD: Wilco's "On and On and On," from Sky Blue Sky. And among his favorite performances of 2007 are the Disney Hall performance of John Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic, and Audra McDonald in a Valentine's Day performance of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at LA Opera.

Wilco's Sky Blue Sky was the BBC Radio 6 Album of the Day today, as part of the station's weeklong run-down of the year's best according to its various presenters. Shaun Keaveny, host of the weekday Breakfast Show, named the album his pick for the year's best.

NPR's music programs and reviewers are turning in their lists for the Best of 2007, and a number of Nonesuch artists are among the top choices from public radio. Wilco's Sky Blue Sky tops World Cafe's list of the best albums of the year. All Things Considered's Banning Eyre has three Nonesuch albums among his Top Ten of 2007: Caetano Veloso's Cê, Sérgio and Odair Assad's Jardim Abandonado, and Youssou N'Dour's Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take). On the list for "Top Ten Jazz Jewels of 2007" from WDUQ is Metheny/Mehldau Quartet. And Wilco's "Hate It Here," from Sky Blue Sky, is among the best songs of the year, per KUT.

When Wilco plays to a hometown crowd for five nights this February, it'll be changing things up a bit. Each night, the band will play a different set, featuring songs from throughout its decade-plus career. Or, as frontman Jeff Tweedy says in Billboard, the band will "attempt the 'complete Wilco' and try to clear out the dusty corners of the catalog that we haven't attended to in a while." The Chicago sets will take place February 15–16 and 18–20. They mark the start of a US tour that will take the band through the Northeast and the South before returning to the Midwest in March.

Wilco's band loft is situated on Chicago's North Side, and that's where writer Bret Gladstone begins his thorough and thoughtful "trip through Jeff Tweedy's world" for the Associated Press. "On the surface, he is—should be—a simple American guy ... who grew up in a blue-collar town made of breweries, foundries, and strip mines," Gladstone writes. "But he‘s also complicated and quite possibly a near-genius. If you can grasp that dichotomy, you've essentially grasped Wilco's music."

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has just announced the nominees for the 50th Annual Grammy Awards, including Nonesuch releases from Wilco, Ry Cooder, Joshua Redman, Stephen Sondheim, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Judith Sherman is up for Classical Producer of the Year, including for Kronos Quartet's recording of Górecki's String Quartet No. 3.

The Guardian has revealed the last batch of albums on its list of the 1,000 all-time must-hears. Earlier this week, we brought you Nonesuch artists A through M on the list. Here are N through Z, along with the Guardian's take on albums from Orchestra Baobab, Astor Piazzolla, Radio Tarifa, Oumou Sangare, SFJAZZ Collective, Taraf de Haïdouks, Rokia Traoré, and Wilco.

On October 25 and 26, Glenn Kotche and Kronos Quartet premiered Glenn's new piece for quartet and percussion, Anomaly, at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Last month, we brought you the notes Glenn wrote for the program, in which he describes the very personal inspiration for the new work. Here, in a note he's written exclusively for the Nonesuch Journal, Glenn shares some insights into the process of composing, rehearsing, and performing a brand new piece during what was already a year of non-stop touring for Wilco, and for Kronos as well.

Inside the 40th Anniversary edition of Rolling Stone and in the first-ever digital edition of the entire magazine is a snazzy four-page foldout devoted to the best in the "indie rock universe," riffing off the interplanetary theme with subheadings like "Intergalactic Ear Killers" and "Lost in Bass." Positioned at the very center of the spread and, therefore, the sonic solar system, is Wilco, among the Masters of the Universe—everybody else just rocks in it.").