In a Los Angeles studio, The Wallflowers' first guitarist stepped back into the producer's chair, and frontman Jakob Dylan took on the lead guitar lines himself. The Wallflowers had already made a name with rootsy, radio-ready rock, but the sessions for Red Letter Days were different. On November 5, 2002, the group released its fourth studio album, and the sound was noticeably more aggressive than anything they had done before.
A new guitarist in the producer's chair
Why does the album sit so uneasily with its own creator? Part of the answer lies in that studio setup. Tobi Miller, the band's first guitarist, produced the record with Bill Appleberry, and for the first time most of the lead guitar work fell to Jakob Dylan. The shift was audible: where earlier Wallflowers records leaned on warm, familiar textures, Red Letter Days pushed harder, and critics noticed the change.
The first single, "When You're On Top," arrived in 2002 and got the album's only music video. It set the tone for a record that Rolling Stone called a "straight-ahead barnburner." Allmusic went further, giving the album four stars out of five. The song "Everybody Out of the Water" stood out especially, a track raw enough to include profanity. The album runs just under fifty minutes and carries thirteen tracks, with the final one, "Empire in My Mind," tucked away as a hidden piece. That hidden track later took on a life of its own, becoming the main theme for the second and third seasons of the television series The Guardian.
Profanity, promotion and chart numbers
That profanity created a strange mismatch on the shelves: the album cover carried no Parental Advisory sticker, even though the lyrics said otherwise. The band played "Everybody Out of the Water" on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, a rare, loud moment of promotion for a record that climbed to number 32 on the Billboard 200 and sold 208 thousand copies by May 2005.
The reviews were solid but not glowing. Metacritic put the album at 63 out of 100, and Rolling Stone gave it three stars. Mojo praised the group for creating some of the best radio-format hooks and melodies around. Yet the record never became the kind of landmark that earlier Wallflowers releases had been, and the sales figures told a quieter story than the band's commercial peak.
The real tension around Red Letter Days comes from Jakob Dylan himself. Years after its release, he admitted that he finds the album difficult to listen to. He thinks the recording does not sound as good as the band's other albums, and the "gloss" of the record bothers him. He still likes the songs, and he still plays some of them live, but as an album he feels the whole thing drifted slightly off course. Years after the original release, the album returned in a new form. For its fifteenth anniversary, it was reissued on vinyl on November 3, 2017, a format that had become rare for the band's earlier expensive original pressings.
That confession is the strange heart of the story: a record that critics called a barnburner, that gave the band some of its sharpest hooks, and that marked Jakob Dylan's full arrival as a lead guitarist, became the one he can barely stand to hear. The songs survived in his live sets, but the album itself remains a moment he would rather leave in the past. Red Letter Days is the sound of a band pushing forward, and of a songwriter looking back and wincing.
Red Letter Days is the sound of a band pushing forward, and of a songwriter looking back and wincing.