Jeff Tweedy
Twilight Override
DBPM
Jeff Tweedy was born a little sad. He’s used that starting point to fight the darkness in so many ways, both as a solo artist or with his iconic indie-rock band Wilco. And let’s just get this out of the way now: there’s been a lot of darkness in the 2020s so far. “Creativity eats darkness,” Tweedy shared as an opening statement for his new triple-album’s bio, explaining why his new set of songs Twilight Override took that expansive form. “Sort of an endless buffet these days—a bottomless basket of rock bottom. Which is, I guess, why I’ve been making so much stuff lately. I mean, is the world getting darker? Sure feels like it.”
On his epic (and only slightly overstuffed) new record, he’s just a dude trying to teach the world to sing anything. He’s a wheel rolling to a stop, a ruminator jumping over a tiny flower, or—like all of us—a person collecting his darkest memories out of the junk drawers of his mind. He’s almost zen-like as he meanders around a rooftop party at LA’s Ace Hotel on “Caught Up in the Past,” or imagining hanging out with multiple versions of himself shooting the shit and staring at an engine block on “Parking Lot.” He even pays homage to his forebears on the hangdog acoustic rocker “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter.” So yeah, like most double or triple albums, there is some hitch in the step, some beer in the gut, but there’s also a lot of resonant and emotive work going on here. Twilight Override contains the kind of rambling folk-rock songwriting Tweedy is known for and continues to deliver decades into his career, and he hits the jackpot on every track across 30 stops.
The first disc of this triplet sets the mood well. “One Tiny Flower” is acoustic guitar, bass, vocals, drums, electric guitar, and some slick Korg Delta synth and piano lines. It’s stripped back and relaxed, like a flower blowing in the wind. “Caught Up in the Past,” “Forever Never Ends,” “Secret Door,” and “Betrayed” follow a similar setup. There’s a lot of acoustic-electric duality in the first section, and it works well to set the stage for what’s to come. And there’s not much deviation across the next two installments. Disc two leans a bit more on moodiness and rock-and-roll mentalities—the Wilco side of the radio dial. Disc three gets spacey and folky and even cosmic, which fits for the end of such an epic musical journey. It shows Tweedy’s range of motion around a noodly riff and middle-aged observations and witticisms, sometimes stumbling into beauty while looking at entropic situations. Late track “Stray Cats in Spain,” for example, sees Tweedy strolling through the lyrics instead of rushing to the chorus.
The album is also a family and friends affair, as evidenced by songs like the acoustic slow jam “Feel Free,” which feature Tweedy’s sons Spencer and Sammy alongside Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart of Finom and Liam Kazar, and on which Tweedy sings with sincerity: “Feel free and make a record with your friends.” On the other end of that spectrum, the loneliness heard on “Too Real” feels like the spaced-out Tweedy from the past when drugs and alcohol were in the picture. “This Is How It Ends” is acoustic falsettos, swirling like aerosolized memories from an old house. WARM and WARMER come to mind.
Whether you play it on shuffle or sink into an easy chair for a deep dive with the lyrics sheet up, Twilight Override is brimming with craftsmanlike songwriting and emotional acuity. The album bio for this audacious project wraps it up even better than going track-by-track for over 30 entries across Twilight Override sprawl: “The twilight of an empire seems like a good enough jumping-off point when one is jumping into the abyss.”
