Jeff Tweedy on His New Triple Album, “Twilight Override”

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Amanda Petrusich is a music critic for The New Yorker.

And recently she sat down in our studio to talk with and hear some songs from Jeff Tweedy, one of the great songwriters working today.

Jeff Tweedy is probably best known as the lead singer of Wilco, the band he formed in Chicago in 1994 as pioneers in the alt-country wave.

In recent years, he's been working more often as a solo artist, putting out both books and records under his own name.

This month, he's releasing Twilight Override, a triple album and a gorgeous, thoughtful meditation.

on time, aging, fear, and persistence.

We're currently living through a moment in which cross-pollination between genres is incredibly commonplace.

But for me, when I first heard Wilco, I was floored by the ways in which Tweety combined a kind of punk scrappiness with that lonesome, yearning country sound.

It spoke to the parts of me that were angry, the parts of me that were sad, and the parts of me that were ecstatic just to be alive, doing all the dumb, goofy, transcendent things humans do.

His work still feels that way to me, as though it contains everything.

Someone's cell phone comes sailing down.

The bones of the books we never found.

The lights on the ridge

winding around.

Shadows in their shadows.

Drugs on drugs

crawling on the ground.

Love is for love.

I want to just start by saying that I really, really love these songs.

I find them incredibly tender and searching and close, and I think sort of inherent to the way they were recorded.

And I'm curious if that quality, that closeness, was something you were purposefully working toward in the studio, or sort of how you got that sound on this.

I have always

gravitated towards the style of recording that's kind of documentary almost.

I want there to be elements where you feel like you can hear someone's fingers or you can hear

that it's a sound that was actually made in a room.

All the things that I think are going to get harder and harder to fake.

I don't know, the kind of like when you play guitar, you don't really you can play the notes correctly, but you almost don't have any control over the squeaks and the buzzes and things like that.

And to me,

that's the beauty of it.

It's like it's not going to be exactly the same every time.

And

I don't know.

I love it.

Same with the voices.

They're not affected in a lot of ways.

And

there's a lot of group singing around one microphone and a lot of choral singing on the record, which was important to me, too.

The opening of Cry Baby Cry almost sounds like it was recorded in the back room of a bar.

What is that?

It sounds like a party.

Cry, baby, cry,

stare

deep in the night.

I know

you try,

but you never

get it right.

It was recorded in my hotel room in Dublin across the river from the bars getting out

in downtown Dublin.

And so those people were all the way, like at least a block away that you can hear.

It was a nice night, so I had the windows open.

I honestly, to begin with,

we did both.

We overdubbed on the one I recorded in my hotel room,

and then we recorded a whole new one in the studio.

And I kind of liked them both.

And then we stumbled upon that transition that feels really satisfying to me, where all of the ambience kind of goes away, and you're in a different room at a different time, you know.

Well, that'll always be how I see you.

It's a triple album, 30 songs.

I'm curious, kind of, how that came to be.

And are you always writing this much material?

It's whittled down from five albums.

So

this is in fact.

This is the edited version of it.

I like going to work every day, and I like having a practice of writing.

And

that tends to, you know, provide a lot of material.

There was an inspiration to make a triple record,

just to fly in the face of how

short everything is getting and how fast everybody wants everything to be.

You don't have to listen to it in one sitting.

And I think the songs hopefully stand on their own, but I do like the idea of giving

someone

almost two hours to to kind of be pulled along by

an outpouring of songs, you know?

It feels almost like there's

a little bit of a punk rock, you know, a threat of defiance through this, which is almost a sort of resistance to modern life or kind of the way we consume culture now.

You know, it's driven by a belief in individuated self-expression and that that's a really essential part of

rock and roll.

It's essential part of art, in my opinion.

It's a continuation of an art form to me that is defiant.

It grows out of

a music that was

formed around the inspiration and genius of probably the least free of our fellow citizens.

And I think that's what resonates to me still, is that it's like the best expression of

what the dream of America, an American ideal, would be.

You know, the individualism, the liberty to be yourself, to think freely.

I don't know.

It's not just America.

The world pushes against that, I think.

But when you think about how

the internet works,

it really is like a conformity machine.

It's really efficient.

It flattens everything.

I see the value in it.

I see the value in people finding each other and how lonely it can be.

But I don't think it supplants real community in a way that is beneficial to people.

And I think think that we should get better at forming communities.

And that's what this record is also to me is spending time just basking in

a little community

that we've put together for this band that actually feels like it's a part of a bigger community in the Wilco fan base and my fan base.

And

that's another like...

a reason it's a triple triple record in a lot of ways it's like oh if you're in you're in you know you want to you want to be with us.

Let's catch up.

Yeah.

And the size too feels significant, but necessary.

Like, as you were saying, the sort of vastness of it feels like an essential part of how it works.

Each track kind of feels like it's in conversation with what happens before and what happens after.

I mean, does it feel that way for you too?

Like if you took one socket.

I've made single records that feel longer

to me.

And I'm not saying I'm not proud of those records.

I just think that I've made records that have an intensity to them that it kind of wears you out a little bit.

Which ones are you thinking of?

I mean, to me, even Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has an intensity to it that feels sort of all at once when you listen through it.

It can be

laborious if you're not in the mood for the whole,

I don't know, to just be in that world for that long.

This one doesn't feel long to me at all.

I did want to ask you a little bit when you're writing, how soon in the process you sort of know whether this will be a solo solo song or a song that could be on a Wilco record?

In general,

anything I write can kind of end up anywhere.

I did specifically write a lot of these songs for

these voices that I knew I was going to sing them with and really challenge myself to sing songs that had longer held notes.

It's not something I gravitate towards.

So, and I think there's a subject matter that comes easier to me in thinking about it in the context of a solo record than in the identity of a band.

You know,

I don't think that I've shied away from having personal

topics on Wilco records and things that I relate to deeply.

But

there's something a little bit more autobiographical and willing to share it as not as a character, but

this is just me singing.

Are there particular songs or artists or albums that you think, well, this is a panacea for me?

This works whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed or freaked out.

Well, yeah, Lou Reed was my babysitter is a song on the record, and it's because I had loaded when I was nine years old or something.

It was a part of the record collection I inherited from my brother.

And I've been listening to that record almost 50 years, you know.

And I'm still sort of captivated by it.

When I was growing up, especially, it wasn't revered as like an important Velvet Underground record.

The fact that Doug Yule sings a bunch of songs that, you know,

took me years to figure out it's not Lou Reed.

Yeah, yeah, me too, actually.

Yeah.

Can I ask you to play a little bit of a Velvet Underground song?

Who loves the sun?

Who cares that it makes showers?

Who cares what it's done

since you broke my heart?

Oh my god.

So beautiful.

That's such a cool song.

Lou Reed with My Babysitter is also one of my favorite songs on this record.

But on that song, you're really channeling Lou and not just sort of in your phrasing and delivery, but I think as you were saying in that song's kind of freedom and attitude.

I want to sweat next to you.

Sweat next to you with the sticky carpet sucking on my shoes.

Cause rock and roll ain't never gonna lose.

Nuh-uh.

I want you to dance into me,

spill my drink.

I wanna feel the kick kicking in my teeth.

My bleeding heart bleeding to the beat.

Look out.

Jeff Tweedy talking with Amanda Petrusich of the New Yorker.

More in a moment.

This episode is brought to you by Old Fitzgerald.

Ah, hello.

Thanks for tuning in.

May I pour you a glass of Old Fitzgerald bottled and bond seven-year-old bourbon?

It hits all the right notes, from a whisper of wheat and lingering brown sugar to subtle oak.

We call it your key to hospitality because the best things in life are better when shared.

The pleasure is ours.

Old Fitzgerald, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Bardstown, Kentucky.

50% alcohol by volume.

Think wisely, drink wisely.

America is changing, and so is the world.

But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval.

It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

I'm Asmakhaled in Washington, D.C.

I'm Tristan Redman in London.

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Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.

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I really love the album title.

And you wrote a little in the album release notes about the word Twilight, which I agree is a beautiful word and a sort of melancholic idea, too.

I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that, you know, Twilight Override.

What does that mean to you?

Yeah, the idea of making peace with something ending,

overriding the dread of,

you know, if we're like looking at the word override, what am I overriding?

It's not just, I mean, Twilight's beautiful.

So you're not really needing needing to override that, but you need to override your fear of it.

And, you know, also remind yourself that twilight, if you don't, if you wake up and you don't know what time of day it is, it could be sunrise.

And, you know, I'm 58 years old.

I would say that that could conceivably be thought of as a twilight.

I love...

I love that I have something to share with my kids.

I love that I have something to share with my kids' friends and bands I meet and younger bands.

I love getting to be

hopefully something to them that I wish some of the bands I really admired had been for me, you know?

That's like kind of a guiding principle is like, what

didn't happen that I wish had happened when I opened up for somebody?

I was like, well, one thing for sure, it's really easy to do is go say hi.

A lot of people didn't, you know, a lot of, and it was like, I understand.

It was just, you know,

you're busy.

You have have to make a conscious effort to do it.

Yeah.

Your sons are both on this record.

That idea of kind of passing a torch.

I don't know, taking a minute to say like, hey, thanks for being here.

You know, this is sort of what I know about this weird work.

Do you feel like being a parent sort of gave you that instinct or helped you hone that instinct of like, I'm going to show you maybe how this works and try to make it easier for you?

Well, I don't know.

I feel like I would, I still probably turn my kids on to more bands than they turn me on to because I listen to a lot of music.

Like everybody assumes, oh, your kids are like telling you about the

pretty back and forth these days.

And just maybe my comfort level around people their age, you know, is enhanced by

my fatherhood.

Yeah.

But I think it's more

really rooted in

a sense of gratitude.

that I've been able to do this thing that I love and I get to do for so long,

I think there's a part of me that wants to feel like I deserve it.

And when you

hopefully

modeling a behavior that is accessible to someone else and also presents an idea of a good strategy for living or coping, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, that reminds me of the word override, too, because in a sense, you're sort of trying to, you know, not right the wrongs of the past or the people who were, you know, maybe less friendly than they should have been to you.

Yeah, override's a word that we use in, I mean, I'm sorry to get back to that, but like we use in computer programming.

We're probably more aware of that word from that world.

Yeah, certainly.

And so I wanted, it's like kind of appropriating it and turning it back on the technology itself or something.

You know, like

I want to override this.

I have the ability to override this by singing a song.

Yeah.

Because I can't be scared when I'm singing.

So that's true for you, that you can't can't sing and be afraid at the same time.

I think so.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

I mean, have you ever tried it?

You don't want to hear me sing, Jeff?

But no, but I know what you mean, actually, because you're.

A lot of people would say the same thing about laughing.

Yeah.

But I do think that's true because

it grounds you in the present, it grounds you in the moment.

You know,

we borrow a lot of fear from our imaginations.

Yeah.

So

overriding that and trying to use

my imagination to, you know, again, reject that and hopefully make something that I can keep singing.

Yes.

We talked a little bit about, or you spoke a little bit about aging.

I mean, you're still pretty young, 58, but

it seems like it's all over the album, the sort of the idea of time and

change.

I don't know, you know, the question of like, well, do we lean into that or do we resist that?

I mean, is aging something you've just started thinking about more recently?

My wife has been through a lot of health issues for, oh, I don't know, the past 16 years or so.

It may be actually since I met her.

Like multiple cancer scares, like, and treatments and things like that.

So

I associate that with aging,

even though that's not necessary.

She was pretty young when the first cancer was diagnosed and surgically removed.

The biggest concern with aging to me is like, obviously, your body, having your body stay in service

of your desires.

Just being more aware of

our body's fallibility.

Something like that.

If time is represented a lot on the record, which I think it is,

in some ways, I think I tried to organize the record as past, present, and future with the three discs.

And,

you know, it was certainly on my mind, but I kind of don't know anybody that isn't like kind of obsessed with time.

Of course.

Yeah.

It's like pushes

in on all of us.

Yeah.

And that idea of sort of hovering, you know, and I don't know, you look at the rest of your life and you think, all right, I've got a third act coming.

You know, what do I want that to look like?

That idea of imagining a future, which is an inherently sort of hopeful thing, right?

To think about how you want to spend the rest of your time.

Right.

How

different time feels post-pandemic.

Yes.

Or like that that that shock to the system seems to have really

reset our relationship with time.

Yeah.

Yes.

I agree.

I feel like we don't talk about that enough.

There is this sort of strange kind of foggy collective like

denial.

In my opinion, everybody is walking around traumatized.

Yeah.

Like like without talking, yeah, literally without talking about it.

But it's like, to me, it's just a matter of fact and with varying degrees of uh severity yeah yes the loneliness wasn't particularly bad for my family because we were all in one house during the pandemic but you know there were people that had their entire worlds turned upside down for a long stretch without any real hope in sight for quite some time yeah i mean and that was another thing that i think also made us consider like the system like our bodily systems you know and the sort of ways in which they can falter uh one of my favorite songs starts out describing a prom night disaster.

You're a kid in a tuxedo, you're throwing up on the side of the road, it's very awful, very hilarious, but then you sing the chorus, forever never ends.

I'm always back there again and again and again.

In what ways are you still living that experience?

I mean,

always.

I just think that we always carry around those.

Don't you,

I don't mean to turn questions back on the interviewer, but don't you have that where you realize that you're reacting to a certain situation and it's 100% informed by something that happened to you in the past?

Of course.

And that you don't even put it together in the moment, but that you realize, oh, I'm not actually upset with the person that I'm talking to.

I'm upset with my math teacher.

Right.

Yes, yes.

This is the great pleasure, perhaps, or sort of revelatory nature of therapy.

I think when maybe you sort of get led back towards, like, maybe it's actually this thing.

Right, but I think songwriting is a form of that in a way.

And certainly, if you have a process that is more oriented towards self-discovery, there's something liberating about naming it

as like I experienced a moment of forever on the side of the road.

A hissing road flare,

baby's breath in her hair

In the middle of nowhere

In the middle of a nightmare

I had to call my dad

I knew he'd be mad

I've never seen him not mad

Vomit in the frozen grass

Peppermint schnapps

Well, here come the cops.

You know, where

it was,

it got really, really dark.

And it's humorous in a way.

Of course, yes.

And as a kid, I probably just assumed that things were going to work out.

Yeah.

But that's, you know, as close to despairing as

you can be

and hopeless.

Yeah.

I'm always back there again and again.

But it

never ends.

I'm always back there.

I remember P.J.

Harvey saying something to me about

how much work the instrumentation does and the melody does in terms of sort of providing more context for a story or more meaning for a story.

And when that disappears and all you have is language, it's a very different challenge.

For sure.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Words on the page.

That's why rock lyrics, generally, even by the people that we revere as, you know, great poets, tend to not look like great poetry on the page,

which is kind of interesting because

some of the first things that we probably have to read

were maybe written down with a melody in mind.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I think.

And it is because they are so

helpful in memorizing something long, attaching it to a melody, attaching it to a meter, made it so much easier to have a story be transmitted across time reliably.

Yeah, yes.

And that's a powerful, I mean, that's a powerful force too.

You know, on this record for me, there's a really palpable thread of

just keep going.

You know, and maybe that's what you were talking about of sort of the structure of past, present, and future

in this sense that life is long and hard and incredible and surprising.

And man, you just got to see what happens next.

You know, don't stop.

I'm curious if that feels true to you, that sort of subtext of the record, and if yes, sort of how you got there, how you got to a place where you thought like just one foot in front of the other.

I don't know if I got there.

It was just like a just a

surrender to it just being the facts, you know.

I have panic disorder and one of the things that comes with that is feeling like you're never going to be okay.

And then you are.

I've seen people

facing circumstances much more harrowing than I'll probably ever face in my life with a lot more resolve and

fearlessness.

I've been fortunate enough to work with Mavis Staples a lot in my life and like several records, and she lives in Chicago.

And I always think about her history,

the history of the movements she was a part of, her family history,

and

her

joy

that is not put on at all.

And

it is so

rebellious to me,

defiant, or it's like dance at them, you know, dance at the bastards.

I have a lyric on the record.

I was like, not to quote, that's what we're here for.

Yes, that's what we're here for.

I want to dance right into the light, you know, and like, you know, instead of like seeing the light at the end of your life and thinking, oh, like, I'm like, I do want to be like, oh, yeah, here we go.

Let's.

I love that.

I'm ready.

That's almost a response to that Dylan Thomas line, right?

It's, I think it's Dylan Thomas, the rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Instead, yeah, dance right in.

It's this way, guys.

I love that.

The congalant.

Just going to limbo right on into the afterlife.

Jeff, I can't thank you enough for this conversation today and that music.

Oh, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Such a pleasure.

It's an honor to be here.

Thank you.

Scratching at the dead golden lawn.

A leaning doe

and a shaking fawn.

I called for you.

Then they were gone.

A planet without moons.

A clock with no noons

Too late, too soon

Love is for love

I'm counting on the spinning type

To follow through

all the night

The kind of dark

that shocks and bites

When the light goes on strike

I can't make it to the mic

Love is love

and like is like

So let's celebrate

for another year

Hunt and kill another hollow fear

Ache for someone

already here.

Catching, I don't care

in the humming summer air.

Love is for love.

And I'm not going anywhere.

Jeff Tweedy's Twilight Override comes out this month.

And you can read Amanda Petrusich on music at New Yorker.com.

And you can subscribe to The New Yorker in that very same place, New Yorker.com.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today.

Thanks for listening.

Hope you enjoyed the show.

See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

We had additional help this week from Pran Bandy.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.

This episode is brought to you by Old Fitzgerald.

Ah, hello.

Thanks for tuning in.

May I pour you a glass of Old Fitzgerald bottled and bond seven-year-old bourbon?

It hits all the right notes, from a whisper of wheat and lingering brown sugar to subtle oak.

We call it your key to hospitality because the best things in life are better when shared.

The pleasure is ours.

Old Fitzgerald, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Bardstown, Kentucky.

50% alcohol by volume.

Think wisely, drink wisely.

Tuna.

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And for the South Pacific Island nations catching the bulk of the global tuna supply, it's big business.

One in every two tuna sandwiches worldwide starts in the Pacific Ocean.

But that might not always be the case.

Climate change is pushing tuna stocks out of these countries' waters onto the high seas, and that does not bode well for these developing economies.

That's coming up on season six of The Catch, coming to you on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.