photo credit: Shervin Lainez

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“This record facilitates a secret club, which flies in the face and is defiant of the current momentum of shorter, more surface-level listening,” Jeff Tweedy says of his fifth solo album, Twilight Override. “The length has an element of intention. I don’t want to be a gatekeeper of my art. Still, I think there is a built-in barrier to a long record where I know only a certain type of listener is going to spend the time listening to the whole thing in one sitting, the way it was created to be listened to.”

Released in September, the three-disc set presents 30 tracks that ruminate on a loose foundation of past, present and future phases—serving as a mirror to the fading glow of society and in full service of Tweedy’s willingness to confront his own condition and human discomforts.

“It’s been the case my whole life. There’s a sensitivity that’s a little bit out of step and alienated from typical discourse, the safe language of sports or the accepted small talk. I have been good at not understanding why people keep so many parts of their fragility a secret. I’m not sure why that is. It’s never made any sense to me because they all have them. It’s pretty clear that everybody is adapting to hurt of some type.”

Vulnerability has been Tweedy’s beacon since he put pen to paper and committed to writing lyrics as a teenager, initially checking the credit through the completion of “Your Little World,” which was passed on to fellow Belleville, Ill. locals Joe Camel and the Caucasians.

In the years that followed, he refined his craft, devising methods that solidified with Uncle Tupelo, the alt-country outfit he shared with Jay Farrar, before the dissolution of the relationship gave rise to Wilco.

Like many band leaders, Tweedy eventually revised his approach and turned inward, seeking an avenue for his own monologue by way of 2017’s Together at Last, a career-spanning acoustic collection that preceded new material on WARM (2018), WARMER (2019) and Love Is the King (2020).

The last three featured Tweedy’s children, Spencer and Sammy, coaxing a multi-generational throughline that bleeds into Twilight Override.

“A lot of things started with just Spencer, Sammy and me kind of shaping something in the studio. Then, there is a good third of the record that was basically me sitting down with an acoustic guitar, teaching everybody the song and not telling anyone what to do, basically improvising an arrangement,” Tweedy says of the process that yielded the triple record.

Despite the solo credit, the album finds a rich mix of voices supporting Tweedy’s tenor, offering harmonies that lift the nonchalant tone of the songwriter’s cathartic release and reconcile with the gloom in the pursuit of flustering loneliness.

Tweedy has earned the two hours of listening that Twilight Override requires. The inherent limitation of its length only amplifies the prolific nature of his lyrics and the gut-punch of reality that permeates themes of time, aging, mortality and nostalgia, while simultaneously providing a sonic cradle for the heavy days.

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Tweedy’s history as a songwriter extends back to his formative years in the Southwestern region of Illinois, closer to St. Louis’ Arch than Chicago’s lake-lined skyscrapers.

The flower of youth signaled Tweedy’s own Primatives dance-hall era, the prelude to Uncle Tupelo. [The name stems from the acceptance of a printer mishap, which resulted in the use of a rather than i.] Regardless of the name change, the Belleville band still identified the musical partnership between Tweedy and Farrar. The less-words-more-playing-bond fizzled right as they were about to ink a deal with the Siren Records division of Warner Bros. for their first major-label effort.

Farrar cut ties with the group, and Tweedy persevered. Wilco dropped their debut, A.M. in 1995 and continued their grind by turning out enduring classics, Being There (1996) and Summerteeth (1999), before their first taste of commercial success with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001).

Their pace never slowed, accounting for A Ghost Is Born’s reception by the Recording Academy after its 2004 arrival. Sky Blue Sky (2007), written after Tweedy checked himself into rehab, solidified Wilco’s current roster, marking the arrival of Nels Cline and Pat Sansone, before the band took the sentiment one step further, delivering their self-titled set, Wilco (The Album) in 2009.

With a two-category Grammy sweep, they had mastered their dexterity in the alternative and Americana spaces. 2011’s The Whole Love boosted Wilco’s status even further, adding rock to their accreditation sheet. Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of their first LP, Star Wars (2015) arrived for free on their website, signaling an increasingly independent approach and a strategy also implemented on Shmilco (2016).

Tweedy dropped his first solo album, Together at Last, in 2017, revisiting material from side projects Loose Fur and Golden Smog, as well as past Wilco releases tracked at the band’s recording studio, The Loft. He kept his foot on the gas, pushing through WARM,WARMER and Love Is the King consecutively, and on an annual basis, before breaking the pattern.

Initially recognizing his gift as a songwriter in the 2018 memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Tweedy flaunted the concept two years later with How to Write a Song, which functions like an analog of methods, techniques and daily rituals that serve the practice. And, he took the concept into overdrive in 2023, pulling memories from other people’s music in World Within a Song.

While working toward his third book, he was also tying the strings on Wilco’s folk-leaning Ode to Joy (2019) and their double album, Cruel Country (2022), never ceasing to neutralize his creative impulse.

“Singing the songs I’ve written for Wilco is very personal, and I feel like it is directly referencing me, but I also think there are autobiographical details that make more sense not being attached to a band identity that come across in some of these songs,” Tweedy says. “When you have a band identity and you write for that band, there are just certain things that feel like they need to stay abstract. I want to give everyone in Wilco a chance to find an emotional buy-in or a way to participate in the emotion of it. It’s the same thing with this band, but there’s also an understanding I’m putting my name on it.”

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Despite the solo status, Twilight Override finds multiple voices singing in unison, emphasizing Tweedy’s proficiency in creating scenes and sensations. “I started writing with the intention of having a choral element. And I wrote a lot of the tried to do—holding notes—because I have a lot of support in this group. Wilco is full of good singers, and we do our harmonies, but there is something soaring about having these strong women’s voices and the family harmony of Spencer and Sammy,” he adds.

Prior to assembling at The Loft for the Twilight Override sessions, Tweedy had already enlisted his sons, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, Liam Kazar and James Elkington to join him on the road in support of Love Is the King. [The family band had also turned in 2014’s Sukierae, which was issued under the name Tweedy.]

The nine-city jaunt, as well as Cunningham and Stewart’s ambition to support Tweedy’s lines on stage, demonstrated how feeling could underscore his prose and heighten its expression while simultaneously helping to define a new era in his sound.

Whereas harmony is interspersed on all three discs, specifics hover on a theopathic plane when juxtaposed to Tweedy’s cutting lines; “Sign of Life” positions the plain-spoken words “I am death/ I am night/ I’m everything you fear” with melodious reinforcement, “Blank Baby” fires rounds that perpetuate the title and haunt “Rip out your tongue/ Hop a train/ Get yourself stung/ Hit yourself sane.”

Similarly, “New Orleans” quakes with the joint acceptance of death, “I’d sway in the four winds/ Digging a grave we’d all get in,” padding the unknown with the comfort of company.

The choral elements of Twilight Override extend the set’s mortal touch, but it’s Tweedy’s commitment to the raw recordings that gives the album its emotional pull. “Something like ‘One Tiny Flower,’ or even ‘Saddest Eyes,’ there are others that are just “Singing the songs I’ve written for Wilco is very personal, and I feel like it is directly referencing me, but I also think there are autobiographical details that make more sense not being attached to a band identity that come across in some of these songs,” Tweedy says. organic, letting it all just be a feeling of something that happens in a room when we get together,” he says. “It’s important to share strings squeaking under your finger, the sound of a drumstick hitting the rim, a voice cracking and communal playing. I think that makes it exponentially more human when people are making mistakes together, hearing each other and giving it the sense that it happened in a room, and it is a document of some reality.

“As things get more and more smoothed out and replicated by machines, absorbed and spit back out as idealized forms of pop music, I recognize and sense more of what has been important to me about records. I’m probably wrong about this, but I think AI would have a tougher time being designed to make flaws and, especially, new flaws.”

Tweedy attributes the approach to what he describes as, “One of the watershed moments in my life.”

“Hearing bootlegs or The Beatles’ Anthology come out with The Beatles sounding human, there’s something really empowering about that as a young musician getting to hear other people sound more like you than this idealized version of a finished product.”

Besides chronicling the people factor, Tweedy experiments with sound using other methods, like clinking ice against a glass on “Betrayed,” scorning, “Sleeper and sleepier/ Eying the ice in my Chablis,” and on the same track, the repetitive middle C with its adjoining lines: “I broke my finger/ Playing middle C/ I keep trying to get you/ Just to notice me.”

On “Cry Baby Cry,” he marries the human element with experimentation. “The beginning is me playing that song when I wrote it in my hotel room in Dublin, on a nice night with the window open,” he says. “There was a bar emptying out across the river. It was probably 2 or 3 a.m., and so that’s how loud they were.

“It just drifted in through the window, and it was such a cool moment in time recording,” he continues. “There’s a whole version of the song like that. Then, eventually, we recorded and overdubbed on my iPhone recording. What you hear on that track is the transition to the studio version. All that ambiance goes away.”

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Like harmony’s capacity to break loneliness and ambiance’s power to shape mood, there’s another hidden layer to Twilight Override.

An unsung feature of the three-part release is the timing of its arrival. “Sort of a bottomless buffet these days— a bottomless basket of rock bottom,” Tweedy writes in the album’s companion essay. Leadership is at war with the people, and while Tweedy isn’t fixing what’s out of his control, he does offer a congenial nudge that lets the listener know they’re not alone.

“I’m speaking on a personal human level,” he says. “I think art is inherently political, but there’s a certain part that is self-liberation. Maintaining the part of yourself that can dream, be creative, imagine, reject things for yourself and embrace beauty. On a smaller scale, I think that’s an act of defiance.”

“Feel Free” leans on anaphora until the feeling sticks and sends a message to those at home: “Feel free/ Get yourself born in the USA/ Love with a love they can’t take away/ Feel Free.” It’s poignant and carries the weight of the times.

Tweedy’s subtle protests never present the grandeur of Picasso’s “Guernica,” but instead suggest a practice of peace and love. “The war Amar Bharati/ Put in his right hand/ He kept it there/ In the air/ Since 1973,” he sings with backing of campfire harmonies and acoustic strums. And still it spells out: “It’s not a made-up story/ Or hyperbole.”

“I’m not prescribing a solution, I’m just allowing myself to share how it feels to be in a certain position at a certain place in time,” he observes. “The idea that it might make someone feel less crazy, to think that somebody else sees it, or that they see their feelings reflected in the art that they are consuming.”

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Some of the feelings also mirrored in the art belong to Tweedy’s sons. “They’ve listened to rough mixes and demos in the car, and they’ve weighed in on stuff as a part of family discussion on a daily basis. In our household, music is just a thing to do. It’s like playing catch or something for another family. It’s a normal activity,” he says. “It just never felt as unattainable as it did when I was growing up. I had to work toward that understanding and give myself permission. So they grew up with that permission.”

Tweedy’s Midwest upbringing wasn’t one with instruments lying around, begging to be played. Instead, records were his pedagogue, receiving his first batch of used vinyl from his sister and aunt, mostly ‘60s pop, before his brother’s stack of obscurities implemented a contrasting phase, introducing a new set of poets and sinners.

For his nod to The Velvet Underground, he packs each verse of Twilight Override single “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” with a mix of “nah-ahs,” “uhs,” “whoos” and “raoohs,” paced with the plain-spoked “look out” and revved-up line “the dead don’t die” on repeat, until it’s clear Tweedy isn’t letting up and their impact endures.

“Stray Cats in Spain,” too, winks at Tweedy’s influences, using the line, “It’s not what you think” as a direct reference to the Long Island band’s Built for Speed contents.

Similarly, music has guided his own kids’ creative paths. Spencer supports Waxahatchee on drums and just released a record, Last Missouri Exit, with his fiancé, Case Oats. Meanwhile, Sammy wrapped his first album, which his dad says, “It’s unlike anything else with the Tweedy name on it.”

“They understand that they’re in a privileged and precarious spot. They get a lot of opportunities coming from this family that maybe not everyone else gets. But, they also get a lot of judgment of nepotism and things that people have a problem with in understandable ways,” he offers humbly. “The kind of nepotism my dad faced on the railroad is that the boss’ son would end up being his boss. I don’t think it’s that. They’re earning their place.”

With his kids by his side, Tweedy will set out and support Twilight Override on the road, whispering the memories that still inform the individual parts of his character, the ache of the present and the nagging truth that all living things have an end date.

In earnest, he dreams, “You hope it keeps somebody company and has a little bit of a consolation element to it, a sense of hopefully people feeling less alone. A higher aspiration than that is to inspire somebody to make their own art.”

Join the club and spark some feelings.