Jeff Tweedy – Love Is The King

This is Jeff Tweedy’s quarantine album. It is my favorite of his non-Wilco work. It harkens back to his alt-country beginnings.

In the context of Wilco you forget what a great guitar player Tweedy is with all the great players in that band. On Love Is The King he reminds us – his electric work is on fire. In a recent Rolling Stone interview he states:

To me, that’s a totally different guy than the guy that’s strumming acoustic guitar and singing, the songwriter. The electric guitar guy is a commentator in a way. And I could never really fuse those two things together performance-wise, to be honest. That’s something that making a record during quarantine allows you to do maybe a little bit more.

These are not Tweedy demos like Springsteen’s Nebraska, this sounds like a band with fully realized arrangements. Not Wilco, but kind of like a simple (in a good way) Wilco.