Lengthy and spacious, Jeff Tweedy’s 30-track triple album flits like a moth drawn to opposing lights: One the moonlight of grim poetics, and the other a bright lamp of hopeful proclamations.
The album’s title, thoughtfully delineated in a two-page bio written by Tweedy, a published author, alludes to the power of creativity to supersede personal and societal darkness. Twilight Override’s lyricism contemplates the collective American rock bottom that is the “twilight of an empire” and the personal ennui that seeps into our individual consciousness at such times.
“I wanna listen to the idiot sing/ Until I can’t feel anything/ ’Cause rock & roll is dead/ But the dead don’t die,” he sings on the radio single “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter.”
“When you choose to do creative things, you align yourself with something that other people call God. And when you align yourself with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction,” Tweedy writes in the bio. “Creativity eats darkness.”
On Zoom with the Chronicle, he’s careful to distinguish this philosophy from the trope of the tortured artist – “Everybody’s tortured, man” – and the idea of bad times being necessary for good art: “I think it’s rude to attribute a work of art, or some work of genius, to an illness or something external.”
The fact remains, though, that music, for Tweedy, has been a lifelong coping mechanism, and his determined love for the artform was instrumental (no pun intended) in beginning his recovery from opioid addiction over two decades ago.
“I was lucky to have music, and it saved my life,” the Chicago-based musician says in a familiar refrain. The following verse is a new one, however. “[Music] was something I love so much that was an easy rock bottom to hit, because it was like: ‘I don’t feel like playing music,’ and that is absolutely wrong. I need help because I don’t want to give that up.”
In the process of writing this record, two hip surgeries forced Tweedy to revisit his addiction in a new way: He took opioids for the first time in more than 20 years. The 58-year-old songwriter planned his medication schedule meticulously, opting to stay in the hospital for extra time after the surgery to avoid being sent home with painkillers. Still, fears and self-doubts immediately rose to the surface.
“Those days in the hospital resulted in songs like ‘Too Real.’ I think that’s basically the experience of that [narcotized] sort of sadness,” Tweedy says. “That was psychologically much harder than the pain of the surgery, to be honest, because I felt immediately: ‘I love this stuff.’ I also felt immediately shame and fear that all was lost – that all of the work I’d done to get healthy was all lost, and it took my wife and friends and everybody to keep me from despair.”
Writing out some of those more emotionally loaded songs, the prolific songsmith recognized that they’d be better suited to his solo project than his ongoing collaborative writing with Wilco, who released the LP Cousin in 2023 and has since put out two expanded versions of earlier records as well as a live album.
“When I picture how a song is going to be recorded, certain songs just don’t feel like they can bear the weight of a full rock band,” Tweedy explains, though that doesn’t fully describe the difference between a solo song and a Wilco song for the outro-loving guitarist: He insists that Wilco songs can be just as personal, and many Twilight Override tracks get a distinctly Tweedy full-band treatment.
“A lot of this material was written for this record with this record in mind and with this band in mind – specifically these voices in mind. Singing with my kids and my extended kid family of Sima [Cunningham, pianist] and Liam [Kazar, bassist] and Macie [Stewart, violinist]. I’ve known all of them since they were literally little kids,” Tweedy says.
The guitarist and vocalist has raised a whole generation of musicians – literally, in the case of Spencer and Sammy Tweedy, his musician sons who play and sing on this record – and stylistically. Wilco, and the elder Tweedy’s other Nineties and 2000s projects (Uncle Tupelo, Golden Smog, Loose Fur), blend psychedelic feedback, instrumental experimentation, and alternative country melodics in a fashion that’s informed much of contemporary indie rock, including the solo work of all of Twilight Override’s collaborators, in one fashion or another, from Cunningham and Stewart’s experimental rock project Finom (fka Ohmme) to solo songwriting guitarist Kazar.
Watching his 30-year-old son, Spencer, tour on drums with Waxahatchee and play alongside Austin legend Willie Nelson, he glimpsed some of the roots of his family band dream.
“There’s this beauty to the way he’s presented himself for so long, and he’s always called it a family band,” Tweedy says. “I never really compare myself to Willie Nelson, I don’t think, but I love seeing that intuition about how music could be shared with your family and your friends.”
Singing with his kids, performing alongside longtime friends, endlessly writing, creating, and playing – it’s all an everyday integration of grounding, optimism-revealing forces for Tweedy. As he posits rhetorically in his Twilight Override musings:
“What else do I have but my songs and my family and my friends? What else do any of us have to keep the lights on? How else can I generate my own light?”
Jeff Tweedy performs at the Paramount Theatre on Nov. 12.