Jeff Tweedy - Twilight Override
★★★★
DBPM
Being a driven and prolific writer, making records since the early 1990s, Jeff Tweedy has on occasion enjoyed a song splurge. The Wilco frontman and bandleader is already responsible for no less than three double albums – ’96’s sweeping twin-disc statement Being There, 2022’s genre-corrupting Cruel Country, and 2014’s Sukierae, his literal dadrock LP with son Spencer on drums.
Even so, a triple album is quite the stretch, Twilight Override boldly joining the exalted/dubious company of All Things Must Pass, Sandinista!, Prince’s Emancipation and, more recently, Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me (2010) and Kamasi Washington’s The Epic (2015). Especially in this age of ever-lowering boredom thresholds, it’s a decidedly chin-first artistic statement.
But, weirdly, given Wilco’s standing as the American art rock equivalent of Radiohead, Tweedy’s songwriting arguably remains underrated. Free of their production bells and whistles – as proven on his first, ‘unplugged’ solo album, 2017’s catalogue set Together At Last – his standout tunes, such as Jesus, Etc., Ashes Of American Flags and Via Chicago, have the distinct ring of modern classics. Often, though, Tweedy’s LPs issued under his own name have come across as merely investigative or fun side-projects. Twilight Override, however, sounds decisively like a Wilco-quality album, and one that walks tall alongside their best records.
Befitting a three-disc set, it’s also wildly eclectic, veering between slanted acoustic tracks, glammy ’70s rock and even ’80s dream pop. Clearly evident in certain parts is the influence of The Velvet Underground, most pointedly in Lou Reed Was My Babysitter, a homage to White Light/White Heat (via Queen Bitch) in which the singer colourfully details his lifelong fealty to rock’n’roll, and continuing urge to feel the thumps of a bass drum “kickin’ in my teeth”.
Here, Tweedy is aided, as he generally is on his solo LPs, by both of his sons, Spencer (drums, percussion) and Sammy (everything from synths to vocals to ‘harmonic oscillator’), along with a host of ancillary voices (see Back Story) and secondary guitarist/ acclaimed artist in his own right, James Elkington. Still, electric guitars are only selectively utilised. When fuzzy solos do arrive they are often artfully frenetic and sometimes even sound untethered to the music. Meanwhile, the breezy acoustic strum of Out In The Dark handbrake-turns in its final seconds into a grinding, Sabbath-y riff.
It’s this kind of jump-cut eclecticism, over a span of 30 tracks –and even a song named Cry Baby Cry – that means that Twilight Override almost inevitably evokes The White Album. The Beatles aside, the gradual disintegration of the hypnotically droning One Tiny Flower, with its serene appreciation of small wonder in a scene of urban decay, also references Wilco themselves, in recalling the disorientating band-breakdown of 1999’s Summerteeth version of Via Chicago.
Here, though, the confusion is partly caused by a lyrical blurring of the present and the past. The title of the staccato violin-driven Caught Up In The Past seems straightforward, but the timeline is slippery: Tweedy lying in his bed at the Ace Hotel in LA, in an indeterminate moment that could be today or back when, listening to the sounds of a party on the roof, and hearing “people in love with a love that just can’t last”.
If it’s a song that speaks of middle-aged ennui, or more generally feeling like an outsider, then the flashbacks to incidents involving the younger Tweedy are more acutely awkward. Recalling the gauche teenage reminiscence of Yankee Foxtrot Hotel’s Heavy Metal Drummer, the prettily melodic This Is How It Ends finds our narrator stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, evocatively being dumped by a girl with a “butterfly tattoo” and “too-tight denim dress”. Forever Never Ends – think Lou Reed jamming with Mott The Hoople in ’72 – offers a vision of his prom night, real or imagined, where he’s ended up in a wintry lay-by, wearing a tuxedo and “red cummerbund”, puking peppermint schnapps and having to call his father to come pick him up. Now, the painful incident has become an inescapable memory loop in the singer’s mind: “I’m always back there again and again.”
At the same time, at the age of 58, perhaps inevitably, Tweedy’s thoughts are turning further to mortality, even if they’ve been recurrent since his adolescence. In the mysterious and allusive Ain’t It A Shame – a reverse image of Terry Jacks’s ’74 deathly pop lament Seasons In The Sun – he’s a young guy lying “on a beach in the sun” welcoming thoughts of his imminent demise, yet accepting “that’s just not how dying’s done”. Even in the throes of this dark rumination, there’s clearly some force pushing him on.
Sometimes, Tweedy simply succumbs to his dissociation. In Mirror, over a heavily distorted bass line, he’s caught staring at his reflection and wondering whether it “will be the person taking your place”. Other times, as in the spoken-word short story Parking Lot, he’s imagining a parallel version of himself – a confident petrolhead examining a car engine and surrounded by admiring buddies. He’s the version of Tweedy, perhaps, who never found music, and his reason for being, even if that now sounds shaky too. Breaking from his reverie, he references, of all people, The New Seekers and exasperatedly declares, “I’d like to teach the world to sing… fuck… anything.”
But what ultimately lingers is a sense of music-led liberation. The seven-minute-long disc two closer Feel Free (similar in its sentiment to the beautiful, Wilco-covered Bill Fay song, Be Not So Fearful) offers multiple playful ways to maintain a breezy outlook: “kick a ball at a tree”, “spin around and get dizzy”, argue about bands (“Let It Be or Let It Bleed”) and most significantly, “make a record with your friends”. In the end, it’s this thrill of communal creativity that colours almost everything here. As a triple record, there are tracks that are less necessary than others, but remarkably it all flows as a cohesive whole, and never loses the listener’s attention. Tweedy’s message appears to be that, for him, a sense of purpose, and a state of joy, can be found in ongoing song and sonic exploration. Sometimes, it seems, more is more.
Twilight Override is out September 26 on DBPM.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklist:
1. One Tiny Flower
2. Caught Up In The Past
3. Parking Lot
4. Forever Never Ends
5. Love Is For Love
6. Mirror
7. Secret Door
8. Betrayed
9. Sign Of Life
10. Throwaway Lines
11. KC Rain (No Wonder)
12. Out In The Dark
13. Better Song
14. New Orleans
15. Over My Head (Everything Goes)
16. Western Clear Skies
17. Blank Baby
18. No One’s Moving On
19. Feel Free
20. Lou Reed Was My Babysitter
21. Amar Bharati
22. Wedding Cake
23. Stray Cats In Spain
24. Ain’t It A Shame
25. Twilight Override
26. Too Real
27. This Is How It Ends
28. Saddest Eyes
29. Cry Baby Cry
30. Enough
Get the definitive verdict on all the month’s essential new releases, reissues, music books and film only in the new issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy HERE!
