Jeff Tweedy – Twilight Override

I am a huge Wilco fan, but Jeff Tweedy’s solo and side projects have generally not resonated with me—until now. Twilight Overdrive is as good as anything in the Wilco catalog.

Per Jon Pareles, in his album review/profile in the New York Times, he provides some of the backstory:

The way Jeff Tweedy tells it, “Twilight Override” — his new triple album, with 30 songs on three discs — got its start on a road trip.

Tweedy, who leads the long-running band Wilco, was planning a four-hour drive with his two sons, Spencer and Sammy. He decided it was a good occasion to listen all the way through “Sandinista!,” the 1980 triple album by the Clash: a sprawl of brash, style-hopping songs and studio experiments. Soon, the idea of making his own triple album took hold. In a video interview, he jokingly dubbed the new album “Sad-inista.”

A triple album is “counterintuitive,” he said. “By giving somebody a lot of music to luxuriate in, you’re setting up a little barrier. But it’s also for a certain type of listener to be rewarded. And I just thought that it flies in the face of a culture that’s gotten faster, more surface level.”

In a pre-release profile in Pitchfork, Tweedy is quoted:

“When you choose to do creative things, you align yourself with something that other people call God, and when you align yourself with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction. You’re on the side of creation. And that does a lot to quell the impulse to destroy. Creativity eats darkness.”

In interviews, Tweedy has suggested his ideal would be for the listener to consume the entire album in one sitting (that would be just shy of two hours). I have yet to do that, but Twilight Overdrive has been in my primary rotation since its release day (in the car, on bike rides, as background music, and active listening, etc.). So I am certainly luxuriating. With each listen, I am not growing tired of it, nor am I tempted to skip a song, and with every listen, I discover a new favorite song.

The collection is generally more relaxed and mellow compared to a Wilco album. Not sloppy, just casual. It is not entirely acoustic, but acousticish (there is some trademark Tweedy cacophony too). It is how I imagine a song sounds before Wilco, the band, “Wilco’s it up.” You forget that, despite Tweedy’s prominence in Wilco (as lead vocalist, composer, lyricist, and frontman), Wilco is first and foremost a band. Twilight Override has a singer-songwriter vibe that is different than Wilco. I am reminded of John Lennon’s work after the Beatles – a whole other thing.

The more I listen, the more I understand that Tweedy did not intend these songs for Wilco. Twilight Override is just Tweedy, which is very Wilcoish, but different. Twilight Override is performed as a band, but not as Wilco: Tweedy (vocals, guitars, and a variety of instruments), Tweedy’s sons Spenser (on drums, vocals, and a variety of other instruments) and Sammy (keys and vocals), Kids These Days’ Kazar (bass, guitar, piano, and vocals), Finom the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist duo Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart (vocals and keys) and English singer-songwriter James Elkington (guitars, mandolin and piano).

I look forward to seeing Jeff Tweedy, with a full band, supporting this album cycle live later this fall at First Avenue in Minneapolis.