Humanity is in a bad way these days, in case you haven’t noticed. Jeff Tweedy has, and he made an album about it — three albums, in fact. Wilco’s prolific frontman has described his new triple LP as his humble effort to push back against the overwhelming darkness of life in the 2020s. And if you’re in the market for 30 new songs by the man who wrote Schmilco, then he’s onto something: Twilight Override is a collection that will make you feel better about everything, at least as long as it’s playing.
Recording with a backing band made up of his two grown sons, Spencer and Sammy, and several of their closest friends, Tweedy spends much of this project in a warm, comfortable folk-rock mode that he’s spent decades honing. Twilight Override‘s first disc eases you into his world with the magisterial melancholy of “Caught Up in the Past,” the lovestruck reverie of “Secret Door,” and the gently loping twang of “Betrayed.” Even his memories of prom-night puking turn golden on “Forever Never Ends,” thanks to a yearning hook that’s worthy of Alex Chilton. The alienated young man Tweedy once was has rarely seemed further away.
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Hints of noise and doubt start to creep in around the edges of the songs on disc two. “Out in the Dark” is a bright, catchy guitar-pop song with an undercurrent of worry; “Better Song” is haunted by the questions artists ask themselves late at night. Things get looser on disc three, whether he’s hooting and hollering on the terrifically titled rec-room jam “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” wringing unexpected pathos out of a rockabilly concert on “Stray Cats in Spain,” or turning in a long-lost, finger-picked sequel to Wilco’s underrated “Muzzle of Bees” on this album’s title track. When Tweedy’s lyrics lapse into obscurity, the healing power of group vocal harmonies is always there to carry him through. And those harmonies, provided by Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, Liam Kazar, and the Tweedy boys, can lift him to some pretty sublime places: “Ain’t It a Shame,” a sun-soaked reflection on mortality and youth, is one of the most flat-out gorgeous ballads he’s ever written.
If you’re looking for an overarching idea that connects all these songs, you might find it in “Feel Free,” where Tweedy shares some of the wisdom he’s accrued over the years in a series of mantra-like verses. He’s got encouraging words on making your way through the rock canon (“Feel free/Let It Bleed or Let It Be/John or Paul, Mick or Keith”), following your dreams (“Feel free/Think of your name on a marquee/Aim for something you can’t see”), and being a kid at heart (“Feel free/Kick a ball at a tree/Trying to retrieve your frisbee”). Most of all, though, he wants anyone listening to try tapping into their own creativity as a renewing, redemptive force: “Feel free/Make a record with your friends/Sing a song that never ends.”
Or maybe the song that explains all the others on this album is “Amar Bharati,” where he sings about an Indian peace activist who’s kept one arm hoisted high for more than 50 years (“It’s not a made-up story/Or hyperbole/It’s right there/In the air/Since 1973”). For a daily practitioner like Tweedy, songwriting might be the same kind of gesture, a symbolic commitment that requires a lot of hard work to mean something.
Some longtime listeners will likely have another kind of question: Why aren’t these Wilco songs? It’s not as if any of them are in such a drastically different style that Tweedy’s main band couldn’t handle them. But that query is rooted in a sense of entitlement that we’d do better to check. Jeff and the guys have given us some truly excellent Wilco records lately — stack up their recent output next to that of Radiohead, to name one band with whom they were often compared at one time, and see how good we fans have it. Maybe there’s an appeal in stretching out without the expectations attached to a new Wilco album. Maybe he just likes how these songs sound with these musicians. Either way, it’s hard to argue with the results.
Taken together, these 30 tracks amplify and enrich each other, adding up to a whopper of an album that rewards the time you spend with it. Go ahead and make your own shorter playlist if you want — Tweedy would surely tell you to feel free — but the truth is there are few obvious candidates for the cutting-room floor on Twilight Override. Even a surreal spoken-word interlude like “Parking Lot” adds something to our understanding of where his head is at right now (daydreaming about himself as a guy from a Springsteen song, apparently). By the time he signs off with the ambiguous reassurance of “Enough,” complete with a blazing electric-scuzz solo that’s pure Tweedy, you’ll believe this is a triple album that needed to be that way. How’s that for a miracle?
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