It’s the dawn of COVID shutdowns in 2020 and Jeff, Spencer, and Sammy Tweedy are driving from Chicago to Yonkers. Sarah Lawrence College is closed, so they’re going back to Sammy’s rented room near campus to retrieve all his belongings. They pack all of it into a minivan and head west. Around 2 AM and about three hours away from the Indiana-Illinois border, Jeff talks through the dark. “Have you guys ever listened to Sandinista!?” he asks his sons. “No,” they say back. “Well,” he begins, “if there’s ever an opportunity to listen to Sandinista!, let’s do it.” It’s the first time Jeff has listened to the Clash’s fourth record all the way in forty years or so. Maybe it’s not obvious to them now, but they’ll make a record just like it—songs that are “excessive and luxuriate in an artist’s idea of a world.” They’ll call it Twilight Override and make it a hangout. But for now, the Tweedys are just trying to get home.
Five years later and I’m deplaning at O’Hare. I have to write this story about Jeff and his kids, and it feels nice to be doing all of that in their hometown. The only problem is: I’m paying an Uber driver sixty bucks to drive me so north of Chicago that I can’t even find the skyline or water from my hotel room. So as I prep for daylong meetings and watch the zoo of Marriotts and Hiltons talk to each other through lit-up windows, I put on Twilight Override and fill up from its faucet of inspiration. The album floors me because Self Portrait and New Morning floor me. “Out in the Dark” could’ve been on Schmilco, and “Stray Cats in Spain” is “Ashes of American Flags”‘s sibling. The older I get, the more prolific Jeff Tweedy becomes: between 2022 and now, forty Wilco songs have come out; a few weeks ago, thirty more were released under his own name. But good luck pinning down a start date for Twilight Override. I should have known better, considering how Jeff outperforms any and all “song-a-day” exercises. But he settles on “about two years ago,” likely so we don’t dawdle in the incidentals. What he can tell me is that most of the songs were written with the band from Twilight Override in mind.
And that band—the Tweedys, Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart from Finom, the great guitarists Liam Kazar and James Elkington—is the one that’s backed Jeff on his solo tours, in some iteration or another, since WARM came out in 2018. “One of the most revelatory things about those shows was how we could arrange songs that didn’t have big, choral elements on their original recordings,” he says. “When we do it live, they would have these soaring choruses and lots of voices. It felt so good. It felt like that’s where I should start next time.” And that’s exactly what he did, but not before producing Finom’s last record, Not God, first. “They’re all-timers,” he gushes. “They’re younger than me, but they’re seasoned pros. And they’re both so incredibly fast at hearing parts and going right to the note that they hear. It’s kind of astonishing, really.” I ask if he’s learned anything from singing with them, and he has, but he can’t tell me what, exactly. “Things are hard for me to say I’ve learned because I don’t understand them,” he concedes. “I’ve just learned them, and that’s been my musical life. I understand how to implement things, but I don’t necessarily understand how to explain to somebody what it is.”
Spencer suggests that a lot of the experience is about “tuning yourself, because ideas get tried, performances happen, choices get made about arrangements, and you’re in a constant state of being formed by that, because you’re witnessing cause and effect, and you’re also witnessing novelty.” The vast majority of it is separate from language, he says, and you don’t even recognize that it’s forming you. But there’s a weird inverse to that, Jeff reveals, in not only playing with somebody who’s got an extensive, conceptual background and understanding of music theory, but knowing that you don’t have that and being affirmed about it regardless. “Them seeing that you bring something of value, that you’re not being looked down upon because you don’t have that, I’ve always found it really liberating and validating to having somebody go, ‘Show me that again,’ and realizing that what I don’t have doesn’t mean that everything is not valuable.”
Collaboration fosters a “constant striving to learn” for Jeff, and that’s been especially true since he asked Cate Le Bon to produce Cousin in 2023. Sammy tells me that his dad’s process of learning is more gradual than his and Spencer’s. “I feel like I’m unlocking specific lessons every individual time I collaborate with anyone,” he says, speaking to his dad. “But you are further down that road; it’s like a gradient for you.” Jeff admits that he approaches his art like he’s got something to learn from just about everybody, elaborating that “in Wilco, Nels [Cline] and Glenn [Kotche] know music theory better than me. I have always assumed that somebody knows more than me.” I tell the trio that the best musicians I’ve encountered are the ones who surround themselves with players and producers who are better than them. “I think that’s true of any walk of life,” Jeff reckons. “You’re better off being challenged by the people you’re in the same room with, rather than being kowtowed to. Everybody benefits from realizing that they don’t know very much. The people that are full of confidence are usually the people that are really insecure and don’t know shit and don’t know they don’t know shit.”
DESPITE SUMMERTEETH,Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and A Ghost is Born existing, the most important work of Jeff’s career is whatever he’s making with his kids. Sammy and Spencer have both been pursuing music on their own for years now: Sammy has a solo synthesizer gig that he keeps up with; Spencer is playing on more great records than I can count on one hand—most famously Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood, and most recently his fiancée Casey Gomez Walker’s debut Case Oats album, Last Missouri Exit. But they both always come back and play with their dad, having formed the Tweedy band together a decade ago before couching it into Jeff’s recent non-Wilco stuff. In-between working on Tigers Blood at Sonic Ranch near the Texas-Mexico border and recording Last Missouri Exit barefoot in a hot Chicago basement, Spencer would come back to Wilco’s infamous hideout, The Loft, to work on Twilight Override with his family or home-record “Wedding Cake” on their property in Michigan. In fact, he’s always thinking about the Loft. “It’s the center of my heart, because it’s an embodiment of focusing on what matters and focusing on emotion and not getting tied up in building a wall for a control room. Wilco has built that room up, over decades, to facilitate creation.”
Spencer includes that, making Twilight Override meant watching his dad’s craft adapt. “I know that we’re all going in there without a specific, finite thing that we need to do. We’re going in [the studio] to follow a process. It was especially so knowing that we’d have other voices, singing and instrumentally. I knew it would, even more quickly, lead to different discoveries than when it’s just our own personalities.” Sammy looks forward to bringing his dad’s song into their final form and see[ing] a bunch of masters at work,” like his brother and engineer Tom Schick. Jeff chimes in to say that Sammy and Spencer have been involved in all of that since they were rugrats, when he was in the Wiggleworm Dads. “We listen to other people’s music, but they’ve also been involved in my process of driving around and listening to my own music and trying to hear things in it and refine it,” he elaborates. “Having two kids that are super into music, super smart, and listening with fresher ears than mine, for as long as they’ve been able to communicate and weigh in on things? I trust their opinions, and I’ve enjoyed being able to share that side of myself.”
“The idea that you are listening to what we think about it could so easily not be the case,” Spencer says. “It could so easily be like, ‘You guys don’t know shit.’ And maybe that’s the norm, or what people would usually expect from a parent, or a more traditional type of dad. But I’ve always been grateful for that, that we’re listened to as people, but even more so about your expertise.”
“That’s a beautiful thing about music in general, that every single person’s feedback matters,” Sammy adds. “Because it’s all subjective. If it hits a person in some way, I’m interested in hearing about that.”
“You’re the authority of your own heart,” Spencer affirms.
“If you’re an empathetic person,” Jeff considers, “I do believe you hear with everyone’s ears in the room. I think we’ve all experienced it, trying to play something for somebody that’s just not into it and not getting it. You hear it differently, it’s diminished. Listening to something in a room with somebody that you can tell is really feeling it, it’s exalted. It’s enhanced. That’s one of the reasons, I think, that parents like to play music from their childhood to their kids—so they can hear it again with that freshness and that sense of discovery. But, really, what we’re all doing is rationalizing that these kids have had a Tweedy-only diet of music since they were kids, and they’re not allowed to listen to anything else.”
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Sammy’s synth work on Twilight Override is a quiet marvel in the background of nearly every track but especially “Caught Up in the Past.” When he was fourteen, Jeff bought him an MS-20 mini synthesizer and it sat untouched in his room “as a source of shame, because it was so intimidating,” he says. “That intimidating nature of the electronic instruments, the fact that they don’t look like the things I had seen being played my whole life… It’s not a guitar, it’s not a bass, it’s not a drum kit. It was like learning how to do a Rubik’s Cube really well.” Synthesis became his way into music, because it was far enough away from his dad and brother’s world that it could be his thing. So he worked on his knowledge of the instrument for ten years, building a modular in his bedroom and making thousands of hours of electronic music on his own until it got to become a part of his dad’s music, which meant “making the synthesizer something that covers the whole frequency spectrum,” much like an effect you might have heard on a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot song. That means using sampling to build orchestras and leads, or to add a train whistle into the backdrop of a country song. Sammy’s synth passages on Twilight Override is, in my mind, equivalent to the use of a Moog on “Space Odyssey” from The Notorious Byrd Brothers, where you don’t even know that it’s a Moog making those secondary sounds.
“I think it makes sense, in hindsight, that he has a really active and imaginative mind,” Jeff says about Sammy. “When he would pick up a guitar, it would be my thing. If he sat behind the drum kit, it was his brother’s thing. There wasn’t an opportunity for him to sound like the things he had in his head. But the synthesizer allowed him to make things that felt imaginative and creative right away. It became much more satisfying, because he could make something nobody else can make. I was really happy when it finally started clicking for him, that the synth was something that he could use to find a way into the world that his brother and I were already sharing.”
A lot of Twilight Override began just like Jeff’s other solo material: with the Tweedys’ voices only. They recorded “Cry, Baby, Cry” and “Ain’t It a Shame” together before anyone else could get to the sessions. “There were times where I was like, ‘All right, well, maybe this is the way we should go, because there is something so simple and satisfying about being this family of voices,” Jeff remembers. But showcasing men and women singing together, he says, and having women’s voices be a prominent part of that family of voices, felt essential, because it was the sound they were all chasing after being on tour and hearing voices together in dressing rooms. “The way it sounds without any PA, when this group of people sit in a room together and sing, it’s really one of my favorite things.”
In 2020, Spencer regaled Pitchforkabout working with his dad: “The biggest obstacle for me was that I’m super precious and anxious about creative stuff. There have been a lot of times where my dad and I have worked together, and I was wound a little too tight about how things were going to turn out, or if we were making something that felt right for us.” Hearing the undone, “Big Pink-style” drum work he’s doing on a lot of Twilight Override, you’d be right to assume that his perspective on preciousness has changed. “Life is only worth living with this degree of wildness and letting things be,” he confirms. “It’s a funny thing, because we’re still painstaking. We spent two years making this record, we listened to it hundreds of times, we were constantly bringing it back up on the mixing console to make things how we want them.” He and the band weren’t ignoring details, either, sometimes going as far as making one-word changes right before mixes were due. “It’s about the attitude with which you do that. We’re not fussy, and we’re doing all of that with this spirit of keeping our eyes on what really matters. And what really matters is how it’s making us feel.” The nits that the Tweedys pick are not in service to perfection or to condense vulnerability. “You can hear a mistake, you can hear us follow something that was unexpected,” Spencer concludes.
“We’re not trying to make an idealized version of something,” Jeff adds. “We’re trying to make sure that this version that we’re going to share with the world has every opportunity to speak and communicate. A lot of people spend a lot of time stressing out about trying to sound like a machine, trying to come closer to a machine. I think the things that we obsess over are the things that make sure that we’re doing due diligence to not sound like a machine.” The whole point of Twilight Override, Spencer tells me, is to “allow something unexpected to happen,” because few feelings are better. “Saddest Eyes” is a product of that ideology: “We had never played the song together before, other than the several times we recorded it, and listening back to it the first time, being like, ‘Oh, my God, we listened to each other and that exists’… It’s insane to feel that.”
So why the hell did these guys make a 3-disc album, an art not lost but impossibly under-explored? The motivations were part-ambition, part-family, Jeff says, but separating that ambition “from the joy of it being done with my family” was difficult. “As the songwriter, having the strong emotional support you get from your family strengthened my resolve to actually do it. Because, there were many times when we were like, ‘Okay, this is just asking for it.’ We could make this into a double record. We probably could make this into a single record, if we really had to. I could have probably, easily, found voices that would say it’s not a good idea…”
“There were some,” Spencer speaks up.
“And I still, to this day, don’t understand what the argument against a triple record would possibly be, other than cost,” Jeff continues. “But we worked to make that pretty close to what a double record is these days. We did our best to make that affordable.” There’s also an argument to be made that, because so many folks have such unlimited access to music all day long, they aren’t consuming a 30-song album like they would have when, say, All Things Must Pass came out, or something. But that never discouraged Jeff from making Twilight Override. “There was no reason not to say what we wanted to say. And my children were very, very helpful in giving me that permission to be big-hearted and dream big about the idea that there’s not a market for being big-hearted, but a need for big heartedness. There’s a need for working against smaller, frivolous things—working towards saying, ‘Hey, sit down and listen to something for two hours.’ I know it’s a lot to ask, but is it? Is it that much to ask, considering how much time people spend playing Candy Crush? It’s really not.”
It helps that Twilight Override is the best record Jeff Tweedy’s made in twenty years—solo, Wilco, or otherwise. Its length is in elite company, indexed into history next to other 30-song releases, like The Beatles and Sandinista!, But its abundance isn’t brand-new in Jeff’s catalogue: Wilco put out Cruel Country, a 21-song project recorded while the band was making Cousin; before that, he and his sons made the double LP Sukierae. Some of the best efforts of Jeff’s solo career occur when he’s got ideas coming out the wazoo. This time, it’s personifying inanimate objects, like an ashtray on “Caught Up In the Past,” or going into spoken-word mode on “Parking Lot” which was a fresh, intimidating idea embraced (with trepidation) by Jeff for the first time in a musical context. “I definitely have a tougher time listening to my speaking voice than my singing voice. It’s such a weird thing, but I’m making peace with that. [Recording that] was really unsettling, but also seemed very effective for those words. Singing those words would have made that song not work.”
The album holds within itself a history of rock and roll, alluding to other musicians or referencing them directly, like having some Paul Westerberg stylings showing up in “Even Here We Are,” or the “a complete unknown” mention in “Enough.” Jeff calls out Mick Jagger and Keith Richards by name once and puts Lou Reed in a song title elsewhere; his “Cry Baby Cry” nearly has the same disc-three placement as the Beatles’ “Cry Baby Cry” on the White Album. I ask him if the “get yourself born in the U.S.A.” lyric in “Feel Free” is meant to be a nod to Springsteen. It’s not a conscious one, he admits. “I always think of that line as being more like, ‘How absurd is it to think that you could get yourself born anywhere?’ But you end up here.”
“Echoes of Springsteen…” Sammy whispers.
“The whole culture is an echo of Springsteen,” Jeff says with a laugh.
Twilight Override is lived in and never shocking. The songs don’t lull or make me question, “Why didn’t he give ten of these to Wilco?” (“It’s whittled down from five records,” Jeff clarifies, grinning. “And the Wilco guys have already put dibs on a lot of those songs.”) The band travels on familiar folk and country paths but makes every step feel inventive, mitigating an exhaustive runtime with humor, delay, sincerity, and experiments done both consciously and not, like “Feel Free,” a palindrome that starts in a different key before rocking back and forth between two chords, one minor and one major, and a repeated phrase sandwiched between rhyming couplets. It’s a damn religious experience, the longer you sit with it. “I think it’s going to reward people, even if they don’t listen to it again and it’s just one two-hour sessions where they give it a chance. I think that that’s not going to be a wasted amount of time,” Jeff says. “It has a potential to be a lovely thing. And we erred on that side, that that dream of making some long, big, lovely thing is not a crime.”
Rachel Bartz
IF YOU READ JEFF TWEEDY’S LAST BOOK,World Within a Song, then you know that bands like the Replacements and Ramones fundamentally changed the way he thinks about music, because he was a punk rock kid in the generation after the one Brian Eno claimed started bands because of the Velvet Underground. But every time I play Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, my mind is taken over by the thought of how many people picked up an instrument for the first time—or turned one inside out—because of it, in the aftermath of September 11th. And I do wonder when bands in my generation will get thrusted into a similar moment, or if we’ve even met that band yet. But we have met Jeff Tweedy, and a part of me has let Twilight Override soothe me today, in the residual of ICE raids, anti-trans legislation, and genocide. But can art—rock and roll, specifically—really change the world now? Could it ever? I do wonder how many people saw the Ramones as a novelty or a joke, and I wonder how many people Wilco as one, too. And I wonder who felt seen and liberated by their music. It’s impossible to predict what a song will do for the people who pick it up. Always has been.
“But on a micro level, or an individual level even, it all still has the potential to make somebody in some room by themselves, or walking down the street with headphones, go, ‘I could do this,’” Jeff gestures. “Maybe the world looks a little different, or maybe it doesn’t have to be that way, but every little bit of people putting music and themselves out into the world with confidence and being themselves on purpose in front of other people, I think that gives other people permission. And that alone maybe isn’t something you can track, but I do think that that still has the potential to be world-changing, because the world is made up of individual worlds that we all carry around with us.”
Twilight Override sounds like an encapsulation of the ideas Jeff has been writing about for three decades, like addiction in “Too Real” or spirituality in “Better Song.” There’s something to be said about making a record this big at the age of fifty-eight, or “wanting to fight back against the ennui.” But this is Jeff Tweedy we’re talking about, and “I always want you around” always becomes “and the hurt gets harder to hide.” I think that says a lot about the type of writer he is when the collapse of the free world is this overwhelming and cruel: optimism holds even near misery. “It’s disorienting,” he admits. “But music has been there for me as a solid ground—as a conflict-free zone for the struggles I was having mentally, in different periods of my life. When it’s external pressures making me feel that way, it works the same way. Music does the same thing.”
Jeff’s aware of the messianic impulse in what he’s about to say to me, but he says it anyway. “I do feel like a congregation has grown up around me, over thirty years of making music or more, that I feel I would be lying if I didn’t say I feel some responsibility towards. And to me, what that says is: If I can dream, if I can hope, if I can focus on making something, I have to. It’s not just for me. When you make it visible to others, there’s a viable strategy in rejecting the world as it is and believing in a world within your power.” Sammy and Spencer have been witnessing their dad cultivate this attitude for their entire lives, and that responsibility sits deeply with them, encouraging them to have meaningful, even uncomfortable dialogues about creative purpose. “I’ve always been self-conscious about art being enough of a participation in society, or in trying to make things better,” Spencer says. “I’m more at peace with that now than ever, for a variety of reasons—one of them being just asking myself, ‘Would I want a world where nobody makes art?’ Of course not. But then I think, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t make art so much. Maybe most of my days should be doing something else more material.’ I just have a lot of faith in the value [of art] and it helping.”
Jeff speaks directly to Spencer: “Is art enough? It’s not. It’s not enough, but it’s not nothing. And a lot of times, it feels like nothing, because the culture perceives it as being very frivolous and self-indulgent. And I get that, but I don’t think that it’s enough and I don’t think that we’ve ever felt like it’s enough.”
“I think it has value,” Spencer responds. “I’ve definitely been concerned about the frivolous-feeling nature of things that are so rewarding. It is so personally rewarding to me. But then I ask, ‘How can this really be… okay?’”
“Does not doing it help anybody?” Jeff asks.
“Yeah, yeah,” Spencer says. “We’re modeling things that we think are constructive and make life better. You’re not tearing people down or hurting people when you’re making stuff. You’re even less so hurting people when you’re doing that with other people, and that’s what we’ve been doing on [Twilight Override].”
“Ten years ago, when I was more of a doomer and really more depressed, I had a really deep suspicion that musical work is a little selfish,” Sammy reveals. But he eventually got older, quit throwing his hands up in the air, and started looking at the tasks laid out for him as a human being. Then, he began to feel confident about creativity’s place in the world, in culture. “Art and music are pretty essential to that,” he says. “If there’s a world worth saving, this is that.”
“If the idea that not making music would allow somebody else to make music, if that was something that seemed not completely irrational, you’d probably contemplate it,” Jeff says, addressing his sons. “But I don’t think that’s a rational thought. The rational parts, to me, are: ‘How do you share this thing that you get to do, not just with people that you don’t know but with people you do know and with bands you admire?’” That’s why Wilco started Solid Sound, to share their audience with other bands and build a place where everyone can give what they love away.
And that even goes back to the nineties, when Jeff’s old band, Uncle Tupelo, was on tour with Michelle Shocked and The Band. During a rehearsal, Rick Danko came up to him and said, “You sound desperate. You should always sound desperate. Don’t lose that.” I ask Jeff how important it is for him to remain desperate so many years later. “I don’t know if my desperation was the same as Rick Danko’s, but I assume that we were talking about the same thing,” he tells me. “I think I get what he meant, and I think that it is very much intact in me, and that is I care deeply. I believe that I care deeply. I know that the world affects me in a way that feels painful, because I care deeply, and I don’t think I’m unique in that. I think a lot of people care deeply and it hurts. The desperation to me is: How do you soothe that aching feeling? But also, how do you connect and how do we get each other to see each other?”
Filibustering, he continues: “I’m desperate to be seen, probably, to some degree. There’s something narcissistic about it, that I’m desperate to be loved. We all are. The artist is just more willing to stand on stage and admit it. That’s something that’s always been weird to me about going out on stage: the audience automatically knows something about you that you don’t know about them, and that is what you’re willing to do to be loved and seen. And that’s a desperate act, in the face of a world that feels like it’s coming apart.”
“Do you think the songs on Twilight Override are desperate?” I ask him, genuinely.
“Yes,” he says, gently, before repeating either the line that opens the last song on the record or the words of his eldest son: “Has it ever been enough?”
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Twilight Override is out now via dBpm Records.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
