Jeff Tweedy was on last night’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Before playing music, the Wilco frontman spoke with Stephen Colbert about his new triple album, Twilight Override, working with his sons, Spencer and Sammy, and more. Watch the interview, along with Tweedy’s performances of “Enough” and “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” below.
Tweedy released the 30-song Twilight Override in September. He is in the midst of a North American tour in support of the triple album.
Jeff Tweedy’s robust collection of songs, Twilight Override, is as overwhelming as it is understated. In The New Yorker’s “Radio Hour” interview with Amanda Petrusich, Tweedy said that, although the LP spans three records, the record feels shorter than some of his other works, particularly those with a certain intensity. He said he whittled it down from five albums’ worth of material, which is the natural result of his yeoman’s approach to songwriting.
Twilight Override, therefore, is not a concept album nor an opus but rather a meditation on Tweedy’s current state and the state of the world. He explores themes such as creativity, patriotism, the simple beauty that surrounds us, and love’s capacity to overcome. Mostly, it’s his vision on various states of being that can be taken whole or sampled independently, depending upon one’s mood. It proves to be a compelling testament to the beauty of art and what unites us together rather than tears us apart.
For those familiar with Tweedy’s larger body of work, similar sonic textures arise over the course of the LP. The opener, “One Tiny Flower”, gets discordant, maybe not to the extent of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), but it certainly harkens back to that beautiful and complicated time. The singer-songwriter’s signature qualities can be felt everywhere, even in the most unflashy ways.
Consider “KC Rain (No Wonder)”, with its prominent acoustic guitar, breathy background vocals, and pastoral electric guitar, and the commonalities become apparent. “Out in the Dark” feels like a faster version of “How to Fight Loneliness” (from Summerteeth), adding some refreshing female accompaniment.
Unlike releasing a massive collection of songs, Tweedy was intentional about this set, which was recorded with a consistent group of musicians, including his two sons, Sammy and Spencer. Time is represented as past, present, and future on the three discs.
Much of the record reflects his psyche at this particular moment, a 58-year-old now confronting mortality and forced to consider the twilight of his own life. Tweedy understands that twilight can be overwhelming, as it comes from or leads to darkness, but it remains entwined with newness and rebirth. There is a certain liberation that comes from reflecting upon such themes, which is manifested here through the act of creation over destruction.
Throughout the record, time can be understood as a specific moment, but it’s also portrayed as fluid. One of the highlights, “Forever Never Ends”, speaks to how we never truly move beyond certain events, especially unpleasant experiences. Tweedy recounts the details from a disastrous prom night, when the band kick things into full gear for a rousing refrain: “Forever never ends / I’m always back there again and again and again.”
The past can emerge from distant places but also from contexts not so far removed. In the “Radio Hour” interview, Tweedy described the collective trauma of the pandemic, which we haven’t fully dealt with and maybe will never overcome. The pulsating “No One’s Moving On”, shot through with angular, messy guitar lines, speaks to that phenomenon with lyrics that say, “Now we’re all so missing / It’s not like the love is gone / All of our ghosts are living / And no one is moving on.” The insights Tweedy offers are poignant and often brilliant.
As an artist, Jeff Tweedy is often regarded as a tremendous songwriter but a lesser poet, a foil to David Berman, if you will. However, the song “Feel Free” would serve as a counterargument to that sentiment. Any number of the images Tweedy includes to represent freedom prove memorable, whether the sentiment be civic (“Carry a torch in the street / Say you’re full when we know you’re empty”), communal (“To fall in love with the people you know / And fall harder for the people you don’t”), or deeply personal (“Swim alone in the open sea / Bounce around holding a baby”). Not since “Jesus, Etc.” has he written something so devastatingly beautiful, and that is saying something.
Some of the tracks feel lived in, frayed by time, especially in how they recall seminal acts that came before. The country-tinged “Betrayed” recalls the early 1970s Grateful Dead, whereas the circular and simple “Western Clear Skies” is more conceptually aligned with the Beatles‘ “White Album”. The saloon-style piano and acoustic instrumentation on “Saddest Eyes” evoke the spirit of groups like the Band, which valued jamming together in a room. Not all throwbacks come through in sepia tones, however, as “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” (another in a long line of Velvet Underground-inspired tunes) brims with energy and celebrates the visceral qualities of being at a rock and roll show.
Throughout the record, Tweedy and company celebrate the organic act of making music, as imperfect as it can be. His mode remains analog in a digital age. The minor miscues or demo recordings show a musician willing to incorporate anything and everything to prioritize authenticity over perfection. “Parking Lot”, which sounds like Craig Finn meets Richmond Fontaine, hears Tweedy saying “fuck” after a misstep, and “Cry Baby Cry”, recorded in a Dublin hotel room, captures the flutter of bars letting out across the river. As with any original recording, Tweedy and his cohort offer something that cannot be replicated.
By no means is Twilight Override perfect, but the musicians clearly poured a lot into this powerful set of 30 songs. The album may not be as intense as some of the others that came before, but Tweedy has arguably become more reflective as he’s aged. In fact, at this moment, he sounds liberated.
In the lead-up to the release, Tweedy spoke about how he’s mainly concerned with a handful of things: feeling free, making records with friends, and adding his voice to the long line of music that came before and will extend far beyond. Of the record, he said, “Sharing this music with the world is the best I can do.” For now and for many years to come, that gesture will prove better than good enough.
Twilight Override is built to be immersive rather than visceral. We are along for the journey, but wary of the thrills. Gas, grass or ass. Lots of cries, lots of laughs. The vogue for Freudian therapy—the once a week, lay on the couch, dig into your childhood stuff—has long since fallen out of favor with the wider psychoanalytic community, replaced by generally faster, less expensive, more efficacious approaches like CBT. Based on the evidence provided by Twilight Override, no one has informed Jeff Tweedy. To the contrary, we are in for the long version—he has felt blank, he has eaten wedding cake, he has seen the expansive Western sky at dusk—the world is too much with him, late and soon. But there is so much splendor too. On the swelling, string-driven “Stray Cats in Spain,” he sees stray cats in Spain, or possibly, rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats. In either case, it is an epiphany bordering on a religious experience: “Oh what a beautiful day,” Tweedy sings, summoning the quivering awe of his “Ashes of American Flags” tenor. He is increasingly attuned to the static-y emotional frequencies of Robert Hunter, where the overlap between bone-deep fatigue, desperate yearning, and the possibility of ecstatic deliverance bind together in a gloriously wobbly existential dance. Like Hunter, he perceives the sublime in the prosaic. When Tweedy sings: “Stray cats in 2019, rocking in the street,” his question-mark vocals suggest one who can’t quite believe he’s witnessed something so transportingly magnificent.
He won’t be your mirror, but he’ll show you where to look. Twilight Override is frequently funny, as on the jaunty “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” where he sings lines like “I want you to blow smoke in my eyes” with Lou-worthy lasciviousness, a worthy update to Jonathan Richman’s positively perfect tribute. “KC Rain (No Wonder)” sounds a little like Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman subjected to shock therapy. The beguilingly weird chamber-pop of “Love Is for Love” evokes the 1970 classic Vintage Violence, as if John Cale had been his babysitter too. On the Sister/Lovers-like “Too Real,” Tweedy lays bare his deepest anxieties behind a tremulous wall of delay reminiscent of the brilliant 4-track recordings of F.M. Cornog’s East River Pipe and Jack Logan’s Bulk. Thus born, the ghosts are everywhere. Infamously, cruelly, Dylan once told Phil Ochs: “You’re not a folk singer, you’re a journalist.” Or was it so cruel? Tweedy is a journalist of the soul, always hunting down those sad-ashtray leads.
Jeff Tweedy is sharing one last single before he releases his new album, Twilight Override, on September 26. “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” comes with a music video by director Austin Vesely that captures Tweedy and his bandmates playing a basement show. Watch it below.
“Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” is about “the joy in this dark music that Lou Reed made, and the beautiful conflict that it creates when you try and analyze it,” Tweedy said in a statement. “And how it was such a positive force for so many people. ‘My life was saved by rock’n’roll’—Lou Reed is saying the same thing. I was babysat by fucking Lou Reed, literally, in my bedroom as a 10-year-old, 12-year-old kid. His music was a more legitimate mentor to me than most of my teachers.”
Tweedy announced Twilight Override in July. The Wilco frontman has shared numerous tracks from the album, including “Enough,” “One Tiny Flower,” “Out in the Dark,” “Stray Cats in Spain,” and “Feel Free.”