The state of the world isn’t exactly making Grammy Award-winning musician Jeff Tweedy feel light these days. As he has since he first learned to play guitar growing up in Belleville, Illinois, the frontman of the alt-rock band Wilco has turned to music – and his family – to meet the moment.
The result is a new solo album, “Twilight Override,” which he recorded with his adult sons, Sammy and Spencer, and close friends. Furiously written over two years, the 30 songs of this triple album, debuting Sept. 26, represent his attempt to “up the wattage” of his own light.
The musician and bestselling author, whose books include one about crafting songs, wants others to feel lighter, too – by creating. “Make a record with your friends,” he croons in “Feel Free.” “Sing a song that never ends.”
Why We Wrote This
When faced with a challenging world, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy turns to songwriting. His new solo album, “Twilight Override,” is fueled by intentionality – valuing connection over division and creation over destruction.
The singer-songwriter spoke with the Monitor recently via Zoom about his “big-hearted outpouring” of music-making. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You made a statement about the release of “Twilight Override”: “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.” For those of us who are not musicians, can you tell us about that feeling of creating a new song in the studio and what it does for your sense of well-being?
I feel very fortunate to have a habit, a practice, a discipline of writing every day and spending time with myself intentionally in my imagination and creating. I think it’s really a tough place to be afraid. I think you feel very, very powerful. Maybe the most powerful I ever feel is in those moments where I’m reminded on a daily basis that I can make something out of nothing, and I have the power to reject the world I disagree with, and in a small way, I can make my own world.
This is something I started noticing a little while ago, maybe in the beginning of this season of whatever it is that we’re experiencing in this country. I think it’s really, really bad to wake up every day thinking about someone you hate. And I think it’s really bad to willingly put yourself in a cage, psychologically, where all you’re thinking about is people you hate, the person you hate. You treat social media like that. You seem to willingly go there to be outraged, to be angry, and to be scared, and be worked up. And what are you losing when you do that? Well, to me, you’re losing the one freedom that is probably gonna be the hardest to take away if you’re willing to preserve it. And that’d be the freedom to think how you want to think, to imagine a better world, maintain some sense of right and wrong.
How has playing with your family changed you as both a songwriter and a musician?
My kids have told me this, and I don’t know how this came about, but I don’t think I ever get in a musical environment where I think that the person I’m playing with is beneath me. And that includes them when they were little kids. Cause there is something super fun about reacting to someone just learning … not making mistakes, but doing things you wouldn’t do. And having their own idea of what music making feels like coming through to you. So there’s a constant learning process, and they’re both really inspiring musicians to me, and I feel somewhat proud of that, that I fostered an environment where they could grow into that. But I don’t know that I have that much to do with it. … Their mother is very musical. She would tell you she’s not, but she also ran a rock club. And so they spent a lot of time there. Their whole lives have really been immersed in a culture of belief that this is just a thing you can do, that it’s not something weird that somebody on stage does. It’s something that the guy sitting on the floor with you does.
I have to ask a book question because our readers love books. You wrote in “How to Write One Song” that books are your companions and that you sometimes read them with a highlighter to mark phrases. What authors would you say have had the biggest impact on your songwriting?
The one I’ve always talked about is William H. Gass, because I think he’s a very difficult author. I can’t say that I’ve read very much of his fiction writing with total understanding. I’ve read a lot of his nonfiction writing, his literary criticism … and seeing other people’s art through his eyes has taught me a whole lot. The one thing I think I’ve gotten from William H. Gass, or tried to get from him, is he is kind of like the king of sentence structure and metaphor, and he was really, really efficient, at least to me, at making something appear that he did not write down on the page. It’s like a haiku. What you’re writing about appears in-between the lines. It appears in your imagination. …
Like there was a red-brick warm when the sun has died. So I can say that, and you can see the red brick, but what I feel like I see is my hand on a red brick. And that sense like, if you’ve ever leaned against a brick building in the middle of the summer and even in the evening, it’s still kind of radiating some heat. That’s all the stuff you see, but you didn’t write all that stuff down. And, I think that something’s really working, language-wise and poetry-wise and lyric-wise to me, when those types of things get conjured. It’s like kind of a magic trick, if you can make a very little bit, a little amount of words, contain a lot of imagery, not even necessarily say a lot, but make you see a lot.
To go back to the idea of bringing light into the world right now, do you also see this album as resistance, as protest?
I do believe that art is inherently political. Even the most cynical art communicates, “I bothered. I took the time. Some part of me must be hopeful because I made this thing and I’m sharing it.” And that all … communicates something that I think is missing most from our discourse, and that is a willingness to listen and a willingness to value connection over division, to value empathy over indifference, and to value creation over destruction. … I believe in rock music and rock ‘n’ roll as being for the people and for beauty, for something sacred. … Part of that belief is, I think, the world would be better if more people intentionally spent time with themselves in a self-discovering act such as creating. I think you learn things about yourself. You make a soul out of nothing.
