Rock

Photographs by Richie Wireman

While fans are gathering at The Wang Theatre in Boston, Patrick Sansone is on the telephone backstage, reaching deeply into his Mississippi roots.

The guitarist, pianist and vocalist for the bands Wilco and The Autumn Defense could allow his mind to concentrate on the show at hand – or wander to the three shows Wilco will play the next day – two in New York's Central Park and on the Late Show with David Letterman. Instead he pays honest and thoughtful homage to the root of his musical upbringing, Marguerite Sansone.

“I consider her to be one of the most naturally musically gifted people I've ever known,” he said of his grandmother. His voice is soft and steady as if he is carefully placing each word behind the next. “I feel like I got a lot of my ear from her. She could hear a song and sit down at the piano and play it. She knew hundreds of songs. She had a lot of knowledge to pass on, and I was a little too young to appreciate a lot of what she was trying to teach me.”

Sansone joined the acclaimed Wilco in 2004 while living in New York, “struggling and just trying to make it month to month being a working musician – sometimes doing it well, sometimes doing it not so well. New York is a hard place to be struggling. If you're broke in New York, you're really broke, and there were definitely times I was broke in New York.”

At press time, Wilco was headed to the United Kingdom to tour its new release “The Whole Love,” in Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol and London. The band's Spain tour afterward in Madrid and Barcelona is sold out. Wilco heads stateside again in December, where concerts are already sold out in Austin, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago. They swing back into Europe in February for sold-out concerts in Brussels and Oslo.

Sansone, 42, had met Wilco founder John Stirratt in 1999 in New Orleans, and the pair started experimenting with and mixing music. “We kept running into each other at guitar shops and listening to the same records, so we started writing music,” he said. Through that collaboration, The Autumn Defense was born, along with the subsequent debut release of “The Green Hour.” The band's decidedly '60s style (reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel) brought further releases, the critically acclaimed “Circles” in 2003, followed by “Birds, Beasts & Flowers,” “The Autumn Defense” and “Once Around” in 2010.