Jeff Tweedy, founding member and frontman of Wilco, is one of contemporary music’s most respected songwriters and performers. In addition to 13 Wilco albums, he has released five solo albums – most recently, his 30-track “magnum opus” (New York Times) Twilight Override. This tour, featuring his sons and longtime collaborators, offers a rare chance to experience songs from across his expansive catalog and step inside the world of Twilight Override.
When you align yourself with creativity and creation, you align yourself with something that other people call God. And if you align yourself with creation, you have automatically taken a side against destruction. You’re on the side of creation. And that does a lot to quell the impulse to destroy.
Is the world getting darker? Sure feels like it. What is it? Is it the pervasive nagging toothache of dread that comes with witnessing the disintegration of a country that you thought you knew and understood? A home you still love with a love that could never be taken away, regardless of how painful that love has become. That sense of decline is hard to ignore, and it must at least be a part of the shroud I’m trying to uncover. The twilight of an empire seems like a good enough jumping-off point when one is jumping into the abyss.
Twilight sure is a pretty word, though. And the world is filled with former empires, so maybe that’s not where this dissonance is coming from entirely. Could be how old I’ve managed to become without warning. What ever it is out there (or in there) squeezing this ennui into my day, it’s fucking overwhelming. It’s difficult to just ignore. Twilight Override is my effort to overwhelm it right back. My effort to engulf this encroaching nighttime (nightmare) of the soul.
What I really want to do is grow my heart big enough to love everyone. And if I want a heart to grow big enough to meet this moment, it requires something expansive. “Like a TRIPLE record!?”,you ask? Yes! Like a goddamn triple record! I mean…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? To me any song, no matter what the subject matter, can be a point of light and that’s one of the reasons I try and make so many of them. They all have the potential, even the heaviest music on the Earth has the potential, to lift someone up. This sounds like a Hallmark card, but it rocks harder than a Hallmark card.
I’m aware the day ends and the sun sets no matter how hard we wish for it to lift itself back out of the ocean. So I guess what we’re really talking about is time. In a way these three records represent the past, present and future. The darkness comes and goes. But the clock keeps plowing ahead. We all want more. But not more of this particular shitty time. It feels like the clock is camped out at the worst part of the day. Everyone stuck saying goodbye to the future they woke up to. Waiting for it to get dark enough to dream up a new day.
Truthfully, I’ve been doing this for a long time. And I’m not going anywhere. This is the stuff that works for me. I can’t sing and be afraid at the same time. And dreaming at twilight isn’t forbidden. Not quite a daydream and nowhere near a nightmare. Twilight dreaming is a lovely workaround. Killing time with key changes and harmonies. Feel free to join us all here. Not singing into the void or at the void. Just singing. Feeling good. Together. It will do you no harm. Sharing this music with the world is the best I can do.