Jeff Tweedy shows up on screen looking like a man who’s spent the morning writing three songs before breakfast—not surprising, given he just dropped Twilight Override, a 30-song triple album that somehow isn’t an act of self-sabotage. When you hear “triple album” from a songwriter this prolific, you instinctively brace for the Billy Corgan of it all. But Tweedy, annoyingly grounded as ever, made something expansive without drifting into chaos: three discs that feel less like a sprawl and more like a long, well-paced walk beside someone who’s thinking out loud.
“I kept adding to the pile,” he shrugs. “And it just kept getting deeper and more substantial.”
That’s Tweedy’s version of a mission statement—gentle, almost apologetic, but with the weight of someone who’s spent decades quietly raising the bar.
The big spark this time was his touring band, who kept turning his solo songs into miniature harmony showcases on the road. “I always come home feeling like we’ve improved the arrangements,” he says. “So I wanted to write for those voices instead of ending up there.” In Tweedy-speak, that’s basically saying he built the record as a love letter to the people he likes singing with.
“Big-hearted” is the phrase he uses more than once—an almost embarrassing trait in our current doom-scroll era, where being earnest is treated like a breach of protocol. But as he starts talking about the last decade, it lands harder than expected. “I think a lot of us have spent the last 10 years waking up every morning and putting ourselves in a cage,” he says. “Voluntarily! Locking it and throwing the keys away.”
You can hear that escape attempt all over Twilight Override, which frames its three discs as past, present, and future—not a dystopian one, either, which he points out almost defensively. “I don’t think you picture a beautiful future without being able to dream it up,” he says. “Just enough hope to imagine something better.”
This is where he drops the line he could frankly stick on a T-shirt and retire:
“It’s hard to stay in love with everyone.”
“Yeah,” he says, laughing, “I could’ve whittled the whole record down to that one line.”
But the past section of the album comes with a different kind of vulnerability. The stuff where you catch him looking straight into the camera, saying: yes, this happened; yes, I’m still thinking about it. “It deepens it when you remind people you're a person who’s had real experiences,” he says. “Not just making it all up.”
And then there’s the guitar playing. If Wilco is where Tweedy leans acoustic while Nels Cline handles aerial acrobatics, Twilight Override is where Tweedy lets himself rip a little. “I let myself play a lot more guitar on the solo records,” he says. “I’m not worried about any technique other than my own.” The messy, beautiful solos—especially the Willie-Nelson-by-way-of-Uncle-Tupelo flourish in “Love Is for Love”—feel like someone rediscovering a language they used to speak fluently, then put away for a while.
Maybe the funniest part of all this is timing. Twilight Override arrives in the same year Wilco quietly hits their 30th anniversary—an occasion most bands would turn into a stadium tour, commemorative box set, maybe a branded bourbon line. Tweedy’s version is a surprise triple album of new material. “We’ve resisted a lot of nostalgia,” he says. “It feels like a trap.” They’re not uninterested in their past—he loved performing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot straight through—but he’s suspicious of calcification. “We try to justify our existence by making new records.”
The whole project, sprawling but tight, hopeful but realistic, ends with “Enough”—after a fake-out song titled “This Is How It Ends.” Because why not. Nothing about this record takes the obvious exit ramp.
“Creativity eats darkness,” he says near the end of our conversation, the closest he comes to sermonizing. “I reject the idea that the world can’t be beautiful. I reserve the right to envision it differently.”
Thirty songs later, you can't help but believe him.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
