Jeff Tweedy changed my life. Ever since 2002, when I fell hard for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot after reading all those rave reviews, Wilco have been one of the mainstays of my music fandom. I’ve probably seen them live more than any other band, always hoping to hear “Misunderstood.” I return to their canonical classics frequently, sometimes for comfort and sometimes to be thrilled by “Via Chicago” or “The Late Greats” all over again. I never miss a new Wilco or Tweedy release, nor do I miss a chance to argue about them online. (My “Ode To Joy is better than Sky Blue Sky” take will never die.) Wilco is always one of the names in rotation when people ask me about my favorite band. I’ve been in the tank for them for so long that, in a parasocial way, they feel like family.
I know I’m not alone in this. The Wilco-loving dad is one of those tropes so rooted in truth that it circles around past cliché to become more like a gravitational constant. But really, bands this beloved, accomplished, and longstanding always have a fan base that extends beyond demographic stereotypes. The coalition is broad enough to include Uncle Tupelo old heads and kids who, like me at age 18, are just now discovering YHF. We Tweedy-heads are legion.
Twilight Override is for us. OK: Duh, the same could be said of every Wilco or Tweedy release. But most of them are not triple albums. Here we have 30(!) new songs, a document of inspiration overflowing. For the casual listener, it’s intimidating, maybe even exhausting. However, if you have love for Tweedy’s music in your heart, if you’ve had your taste imprinted by his weary rasp and expansive sonic vision, if multiple eras of your life have been soundtracked by Wilco, how can you be anything but grateful for such an outpouring?
If Tweedy hasn’t already changed your life, this album is probably not going to be what turns you into a fan. The bold swings and bracing emotional stakes of Wilco’s legend-making era have long since given way to a subtler, steadier approach. It’s not that Tweedy is on autopilot here. He’s still finding fresh assortments of talent to work with — in this case, the all-Chicagoan band is his sons Spencer and Sammy, his longtime collaborator James Elkington, Finom members Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham, and solo artist Liam Kazar. He’s still taking creative risks, leaping around between styles, tapping into emotional and psychological states not available to most artists of his ilk. He remains a national treasure. But he’s long since moved on from the sense of constant upheaval and revolution that once put Wilco among the most exciting bands in the world. His records now feel more like letters from an old friend, the musical equivalent of the thoughtful dispatches he regularly posts to his Substack.
Given the amount of music collected here, it might actually make more sense to compare Twilight Override to one of Tweedy’s books — not so much the 2018 memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), with its longform narrative arc, but certainly 2023’s World Within A Song, a series of vignettes that can be experienced in bits and pieces. Even when consumed as a whole, in one long sitting, the album feels like it would work just as well on shuffle. It’s difficult to wrap your head around any set of songs this large, but Twilight Override does not demand to be processed and internalized. It’s more like an environment to live in.
That’s not to say it all sounds the same. Tweedy is still a savvy singer-songwriter and a skilled sonic craftsman, and there’s lots of variation within Twilight Override: rousing rockers and somber ballads, deep vulnerability and wry humor, brisk momentum and brazen dirges. Some songs transform along the way, like when the country-rock strut “Betrayed” collapses into a chaotic Pavement pile-up, or the gospel-inflected folk song “New Orleans” morphs into a collage of trembling, jittery guitar. Not many artists would put a song like “Parking Lot,” with its eerily glowing arrangement and spoken-word vocal about dreaming of an alternate self, on the same album as the saucy rocker “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” or the violin-laced acoustic track of “Throwaway Lines.”
Despite the variation, a sense of twilight really does override the proceedings. Stretches of the tracklist blur together and fade into the background until one of the stunners breaks through — gems like the low-key finger-snapper “Out In The Dark,” the sighing epic “One Tiny Flower,” and the gorgeous, minimal, piercing “Stray Cats In Spain.” The album is similarly speckled with brilliant lyrics, be it comedic asides like “I didn’t want to come to your stupid prom” on the easygoing roots rocker “Forever Never Ends” or this sequence on the slow jam “Ain’t It A Shame” that stopped me in my tracks: “Ain’t it a shame when you wanna die on a beach in the sun/ Not a cloud in the sky, and that’s just not how dyin’s done.”
If any song here seems destined to remain in setlists indefinitely, it’s “Feel Free,” a gentle word of encouragement that manages to be funny, wise, and genuinely moving despite being so loosely constructed that Tweedy invited fans to submit additional verses. It’s delivered so casually that it almost feels tossed off, yet it’s proof this guy can still string together a few chords and sentences and make it feel like magic. That said, while we’re on the subject of involving listeners in the creative process, I could have a lot of fun paring the tracklist down to just one disc, seeing what sort of masterpiece might be buried within. In that way, too, despite its flaws and maybe even because of them, Twilight Override feels like a gift to the real heads: the impetus for countless future friendly discussions and debates, a vault-clearing deluxe reissue you don’t have to wait decades for.
