Company In My Back

I think all of the comments above are missing - or eliding - the most important nuance of the song, to wit, that the company is "in" his back, not "on" it. One would certainly expect Tweedy to say "on" if he meant "on," no? It's certainly the more natural formulation. So here's my take: The company - literally, the company that has contracted him to make sales-worthy music - is operating him like a ventriloquist dummy. (Metaphorically, of course.) This is something he discovers whenever his production begins to lag and the studio costs mount - he finds that he is not really the one controlling the process. The "steady crushing hand" is.

This brings about the tension of the song. Basically, the external pressures encourage the drinking and the drinking undermines the writing, which then brings about more of the pressure and more of the drinking. The drinking is referenced pretty explicitly in the small asides following the first and second verses (I'm excluding the chorus.) His reference to vomiting during "your afternoon" suggests that he's really not in any condition to work during the studio time that the company booked for him.

The verses, meanwhile, are the artist-protagonist's mangled attempts to convert his ideas into useful lyrics under these very unfavorable conditions. (A very good suggestion from earlier in the forum was that Tweedy was actually trying to adapt a poem he had written. It was probably something that he had imagined would one day work as a song, but now finds the verses unaccommodating.) Lyrics like "Hide your soft skin", "your sorrow is sunshine" "Listen to my eyes" are presented as a triptych of hackneyed "writerly" cliches that echo in his head and bog down the writing process. He can't help musing that if his bloodshot eyes really could make sounds, as the nonsense lyric would suggest, they would be "hissing radiator tunes" - just a bunch of atonal noise. Almost all of the verse lyrics are gaseous, overwrought attempts to render his thoughts poetically: "attack with love," "pure bug beauty" - just like "sorrow is sunshine" or "listen to my eyes" - are ridiculously strained attempts at creating metaphorical meaning through ironic lyrical constructions. The bridge of the song (beginning with "Under your bended knee" - note that the dummy is no longer atop the ventriloquist's bended knee, but rather under it) is a final drunken lament, this time in the imaginative, despairing voice of an artist wallowing in self-pity and frustration. Yes, he will "always die" - perhaps very soon - and the suits will have nothing to show for their badgering but his memory. Is that how they would prefer it to be?

So essentially I see the song as an elaborate plea to the higher-ups to lay off. The real cleverness here is that the plea is couched as airy poetry about the usual themes of love and beauty etc. The subaudition is that he can only do the artistic stuff he was presumably hired to do if the bosses would give him some space to work.

One more note: I think it's always very important to pay attention to the instrumentation when trying to interpret Wilco. In "Company in my Back," the band basically foreshadows the theme of the song with the echoing start-stop cadences of the opening riffs. The instrumentation in the verses, on the other hand, are rendered in wistful, melodic tones, with the organ riffs drifting off into the ether.