NPR Music - Why Wilco's Jeff Tweedy still finds joy in troubled times

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

The Wilco frontman talks about his new triple solo album, 'Twilight Override,' an enthralling opus on the miracle and wonder of life, and why he can't get enough of it, even when everything seems bad.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

It's All Songs Considered from In Pure Music. I'm Robin Hilton, and I'm talking this week with Jeff Tweedy, Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco, about what I think is an incredible new solo album he's got called Twilight Override. This new solo album from Jeff Tweedy, Twilight Override, it's a ton of music. It's a triple album, about two hours worth of songs. and they're all about essentially the miracle of life, about how fragile life can be, about the vastness of time, about all the ways our lives and the world would be different if we just made different choices. He reflects on his childhood a lot.

But more than all of that, it's an album about simple pleasures, especially the simple joy of just being together. Jeff Tweedy recorded Twilight Override with his two sons, Spencer and Sammy and a group of close friends. This whole project is very intentional. It's Jeff Tweety's way of pushing back against everything that feels bad about the world right now,

and he's doing it in the only way that he knows how, and that's with music. In fact, he says Twilight Override is his attempt to overwhelm an overwhelming world, and overwhelm that world with songs that help him let go over the heaviness in his life, and open his heart to everyone. And that's true, even when some of the themes and stories in these songs are painful. There's so much music, so many ideas across this album. It's really hard to know where to start. So when I sat down with Jeff to talk about it,

we decided to just start at the beginning with the opening cut to the album. It's a song called One Tiny Flower. Jumping over One tiny flower I'm jumping over One tiny flower I'm jumping over Tell me what's going on in this song

Because I think I maybe misread it when I first played it on the show When it came out as a single How did you misread it? I mean, I don't know if that's possible Well, okay So I thought it was just About the simple joy of

kind of being in your own skin and walking through the world and skipping over a flower that's grown out of a crack in the sidewalk and nothing bad happens. Uh-oh. But maybe that's not exactly what's happening. Well, it's a pretty improvised piece of music. And initially was a poem set to a piece of music that was flexible enough for us to not play it the same each time we tried to play it. So we played it like three or four times. Each one was pretty different.

I think that ends up being an edit of like one or two performances. But the overall poem was directed at the notion, and this is going to blow your mind because it sounds like it's the opposite of what you took out of it. Somebody somewhere must have jumped over a tiny flower like we have the impulse to do sometimes and fall into their death. Right. And I thought that would be, it seems like it's inevitable that that has, if it hasn't happened, it will happen. But I'm sure it's happened, which is a crazy thing to think about.

This impulse to like preserve some like insignificant to us life to most of the time ends up ending someone's life. And so the record kind of to me started with this guy laying on the ground watching the car pull up. and block out the sun as he's basically losing consciousness. And then the rest of the record, it set up the rest of the record to me because I thought that the rest of the record is just kind of life flashing before one's eyes or something, you know, except that the last disc is more focused on the future, you know. So this isn't explicitly in these lyrics, is it more communicated in the music? when the music gets a little more jagged?

Or is it just the idea you had in mind? I mean, it's like a lot of poetry. I know you can't see what's in my head, but I do think it's communicated in the words, too. Skeleton under my, you know, he's like the imagery gets darker. He says, I know I'm not the only one. He's like kind of consoling himself that he's not the only one that's fallen over. I don't know.

I don't know. It's just sort of funny. It's not, like, super serious. And, yeah, it didn't have to be explicit that. In a way, I maybe shouldn't even be telling you this because I think it's, I should have maybe just let you have your own imagery and your own idea of where the song was going to take you, you know. Well, it was a really beautiful moment for me, and it's kind of ruined.

Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, no. No, it's still great. I mean, that's something, and we can talk more about this when we get to some of the other songs. I mean, that's something that I feel is always in your music, the contrast of sort of the light and dark, the good and bad in life. There always seems to be in your... The twilight.

Yeah, the twilight. Or, you know, what's the Leonard Cohen line about cracks being the... That's how the light gets in? That's how the light gets in. When I listen to your music, I very often think the exact opposite. It's where the darkness gets in. Because the song will seem like it's shimmering. and bright and everything's happy.

A guy's just skipping over a flower. But I do remember when I was talking about this song on the show that the person was on the show with me, we both agreed, there's something going on here. Like, something's a little off, and that's where the darkness is creeping in through the cracks. Right. Well, I mean, if you look at the horizon at sunset or daybreak, that point where white and dark meet,

that's what we all think of is beauty. That's where the beauty lives is in that space that's blurry and leaks into it each other. There seems to be a clear line, and just above it there's this sort of mysterious array of colors, and we're drawn to it. I mean, humans are drawn to looking at that and thinking about it. It's symbolic in ways that we don't tend to even comprehend most of the time. But to me, it's just like a good example of how the real world provides, you know, nature provides of why those two things are so beautiful next to each other to me. All the colors that come out in that moment when it seems like the day's gone.

And they seem to be unpredictable and different on a daily basis if you're paying attention to them, you know. Another theme, obviously, that comes out in this song is just the tenuous and the fragility of life. Is that something you find yourself thinking more about as you get older? I think I started out thinking about that, you know. I think I've had an anxiety about losing people at a very young age. It's an intense thing growing up in a house with an alcoholic. And, you know, I think not to get too into like, I'm mining my trauma for, like, for art or whatever. I just think that that's just a natural obsession because the rugs kind of always being pulled out from under you.

you kind of tend to cling to the things that you can find that are stable, like the person that's stable. And in my case, it was my mother, you know, and so you kind of have this knowledge that, oh, man, I don't know what if this wasn't the way it is? And once you figure out that that's going to happen someday, it becomes your worst fear. And I've lived through my worst fear now. I don't, you know, I don't have parents. But I do think that it's a natural thing to obsess about.

I'm not the first artist or musician or any, you know, it's just a human being walking around thinking about this stuff. I guess what I'm curious about is why it's so hard for us to talk about. It just seems like it's a bummer to talk about. Yeah. And I don't know why that is. because to me it's a reminder to do stuff it's a reminder to to make an effort and to not sit around and be angry you know you have come to the right place jeff but yeah it makes getting it out there it makes you uh i like how

you put it better than how i've put it which i just say it just makes me appreciate everything more yeah and i've also you know I'm living with a woman that has gone through tons and tons of cancer treatment. She's doing well. But, you know, there's like, it's not been something that we haven't had to think about quite a bit. And the scares that come with, you know, monthly scans and all kinds of stuff. It's just been a part of my life for a pretty long time. That reality, not just the contemplation of it, but the, you know, this sort of of futile attempt to prepare yourself for something that's inevitable, but you just don't want to

talk about it like that, you know? It's hard not to be afraid all the time. Yeah. You know, the weird thing is my mother was, she never graduated high school, and I've talked about her fair amount over the years when I get asked about things. But she had some deep intelligence, you know, and she has so much. many things that have still stuck with me that she said that she really got and she said you're bar you know when you say you're worried about something that was going to happen or might happen

she said well don't borrow that sadness from tomorrow you know don't borrow that pain when you don't it's not yours yet wow mine always said don't be sad it's over be glad it happened right yeah well you obviously do a lot of reflecting on youth and childhood and that whole time in your life. I want to play the song, Parking Lot. There's a version of me that hangs out in parking lots. In my brain or my subconscious, whatever. He has a car, the hood has popped.

Talking to some other me's I don't recognize. Gathered around, staring down at the engine bar. My older me's, this guy, this show off, showing off. The speak singing on this really, really threw me. I was not expecting this. I couldn't figure out a way to sing this poem. I couldn't really figure out a way to put it to music until I came up with this piece of music and then, I don't know, at some point it just struck me that I should just try and read this poem over this piece of music. And I did, it did it on an acoustic guitar on my phone. And it seemed to

work, it seemed to be kind of almost startling to me to have to listen to my speaking voice. I've grown to actually love listening to myself sing. It's a weird thing. It's like I love making records and I love I love that I've learned how to get, I mean, I feel like I'm still trying to get better and I've noticed some improvement over 30 years and I enjoy hearing that improvement. And I love that I can use my voice in certain ways that feel like they communicate. But speaking, like, I'll never listen to this. This would drive me crazy. Like, I didn't, you know, audiobooks are the worst thing that's ever happened to me, you know, when I've written books and then I have to have to have to read them. So I just kept, so I just, I thought that

that discomfort was something that would actually enhance those words. that lyric. Well, I like what you say, and I like the place it takes me, and the images it conjures. You know, thematically, it reminds me of what is probably my favorite Woco song, and that's normal American kids from Schmoko, which is, it kind of mines that same period of your life, you know, I mean, that's a very rich period to mine. I feel, I think about young, little Jeff all the time, you know, whatever. The child, Jeff, I feel very connected to that kid. I think that as an artist, that's kind of your goal, I think, is to be conversant with this

less formed version of yourself, less opinionated version of yourself, this more creative version of yourself, this sort of emotional sponge taking the world in, not knowing anything. And I completely feel like I'm the same person. I don't... One of the things that causes anxiety sometimes is just waking up and realizing I'm 58 years old because I do not feel like that. I think most people that as they age, they have a similar sensation. It's like, wait, what? When did this happen? How did this happen? I'm the same age. And I think, so am I going to, if I'm lucky enough, am I going to wake up at 85 and think, oh, I just thought I'd feel older. Yeah.

I mean, I think so. I think until, you know, I would say until your body starts giving out, but I have two new hips, you know. Yeah, you're half robot now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. When you look back at that time, do you romanticize that period or is it just like a morass of regret or both? No, it's not regret. it's just really curious.

I don't know how to describe it. I know that that guy, that little kid, was pretty intense and sad and struggling to connect with friends, struggling to make sense of a lot of things, but in a lot of ways still kind of had some things figured out. You know, I don't know. It's not a great thing to talk about because I think it's probably pretty normal, you know. It was really sensitive, a really sensitive kid, and it's obvious that I retained a lot of that sensitivity.

Well, it makes me think of the song Casey Raine. I was born a little sad, never knew what I had. Mom and Dad let it slug. No wonder. Never satisfied. I swed and I swooned at the moon. Tied myself to the ties.

No wonder I never satisfied. There's a lot of songs on this record where I think, well, I could have just summed the triple record up into that one line. And one of the lines that comes up sometimes is I was born a little sad. Yeah. Well, I ask you about like, whether or not you think about your childhood with any kind of regret or whatever.

Because I think that one of the themes that comes up on the record is the idea of the different lives that you could have lived with different choices or maybe of things that turned out differently. Maybe the idea of do-overs. It's in parking lot. It's caught up in the past. And it comes up in other places like on Casey Wray. Yeah. Some of it is just cosmic luck, you know.

And I think about my hometown a lot also because I left. And I grew up thinking that people don't leave. And I grew up with a prevailing attitude that if you leave, you think you're better than us. And that was stultifying, I think, for a lot of people. And effective at limiting people's dreams and their horizons. And then I also think I'm trying to make peace with that because I don't think I'm better than that. I don't think I'm better than them. I think that if I had not had the certain twists and turns of cosmic luck that we're talking about,

I'm dreaming about being a guy that had found a different thing, you know, and would be engaged in his passion and sharing it with somebody else. Like the guy that I'm talking about are the alternative me's in that song. I'm singing or talking about them with empathy or with like, you know, sort of admiration even, I think. On parking lot, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Do you ever think about what your life would have turned out like had you stayed? Yeah, I mean, that's basically kind of, I think that's the broader context is what would it look like without music, without this.

bizarre, to me, circumstance where I actually learned how to play guitar. I don't remember doing that. I have very little memory about how that happened. I know that I wanted to. I know there was a desire. I know that there was an aspiration and even a lie that I knew how to before that happened. But the lie seemed to have manifested itself without me paying attention. Can I tell you what my favorite, on the album is? Sure, but my response is going to be what's wrong with the other ones. What? You don't like the blue tie? New Orleans. Oh, wow. Cool. Yeah, New Orleans is my favorite song.

This song makes me cry. Oh, thank you. Yeah, it kind of wrecks me. And when I started digging into the lyrics, I couldn't figure out why. Well, I could tell you some, that makes me cry about it. And it's like, I don't know if this isn't, I don't know. The day that I recorded the guitars that are in the middle of that song, which I feel like are very emotional and very broken and chaotic and beautiful. I just feel like I stumbled upon this sound.

I was looking for this sound and I got closer to what was in my head than I expected to get. We ended up recording the glares of this sort of fractured guitar that did most of the emotional heavy lifting, I thought, in the song. There's this underlying sort of sadness and fear, but it's about a parade in New Orleans. But the day that I recorded those, my friend Steve Albini died that evening. and we were at the hospital with his wife until about 4 in the morning my wife and I came home

and Sammy was at home with us and my kids grew up with Steve and being around Steve and so Sammy was up wanting to know what had happened and so we sat up and we talked a little bit and cried and then And I was having a tough time processing this. I still am, honestly, because it didn't seem like somebody that could die.

And in a lot of ways, he couldn't, he can't, because I already had a version of him in my mind before I even met him. So there was my friend, but there's also this larger than life version. But so we talked for a little while, and he was kind of. crying. I was feeling fairly numb and stoic. And then Sammy asked what I had done that day on the record, because we've all been making this record together, my children. And we listened to that. And he hadn't heard it yet. And it was extremely emotional. We both cried a lot. It was like it had, it unlocked something that allowed a certain amount of, grief to pour out, I don't really know. I don't know why it had such a profound effect,

but it made me feel like there was something more meaningful about that part and would always be more meaningful to me about that part going forward because it would always remind me of that night. And it does. But it wasn't put there intentionally. It's just that the music was, the intention of the music was pure enough to absorb that emotion and reflect it in a kind and open way. Well, that's really interesting because there was something in the song that made me think about my kids and how fast time passes, how short our time is here and with our kids. And maybe this is true, you know, across much of the album. but I feel a lot of love and wonder and gratitude in the song New Orleans.

Also, a sense, though, that there's just kind of something coming for you. Go ahead. The love song also has one of the only sort of sideways direct references, at least to me, of the current climate. And at the very last thing, it's like I'm afraid of the suede boots and snake skin walking in. Yeah, I did catch that. You know, there's this sense that there are people walking amongst us that we don't really know how to identify, but feel somehow more dangerous than they should be. you talk about writing around something

or not coming at it too directly I think you said sideways about that song but that's something that I think you've always done really well with your lyrics that you never come at anything too directly I mean

what's the opening line I trade all my four limbs for a parade in New Orleans yeah and it makes me think of an assumption I've always had about you and maybe you can finally correct this assumption

or confirm it, which is I sometimes listen to your stuff and I think he just likes the way these words sound together. Like, I'm an American aquarium drinker. I assassin down the avenue is maybe one of the most brilliant lyrics ever written. And I just like the way all those words sound together. I'm not even sure what they mean. Well, yes, I don't. I think it's hard to put two words next to each other without them conjuring. some meaning. I think that the way language works and the way our minds work, we don't like things not making sense. And so, you know, it's the same thing that happens when you look at a cloud. It doesn't make sense. So our brains start to see faces and animals and attribute shapes to it that maybe one person sees and the next person doesn't see it. But it's there. And that's the way I think

about these lyrics, I think I do see something in them. It's not just that the language sounds good to me, but it's because the language sounds good to me, something else appears. And I don't know how to tell you what that is because it only appears when those words are sung, or like when you hear them. So it's a conjuring of some sort, you know, it's just a, which is beautiful, that it can happen, that it works that way, poetry, language. We can see things that were not written explicitly. That's the best stuff. And why art like this works when just straight up trying to talk with somebody doesn't? Because it's a communication on a different plane of communication. We need information. We share information. We share feelings. We share. We express things as best we can. And then there's a whole

other world of things that we cannot express any other way. And that's why you can't just tell somebody a song. I'm going to tell you a song. You can tell me about a song. You can explain what it means to you, but you can't make me hear it without ever having heard it. I am. Let's talk about the song, Feel Free. Get on the floor and dream. Cutting pictures. of a magazine, feel free. Feel free. Plant yourself like a seed. Take your time being buried.

Feel free. Carry a torch in the street. Say you're full when we know you're empty. Feel free. It's kind of epic. And it feels like a manifesto. Yeah, I was fascinated with the phrase, feel free, you know, like more in a negative sense, you know, like, oh, you want to do that? Well, feel free to ruin your life, you know.

You know, it seemed like it was kind of an interesting phrase that was a little bit of a Rorschach test, you know, and when you just looked at it on the page, which comes to you first. this invitation to liberate yourself or a dismissive comment regarding someone else's attempt to liberate themselves. Right. And so that alone probably would have steered me towards trying to write a song around that phrase. But inevitably, what ended up happening is I came up with a poetic form that was appealing to me. And just like feel free, rhyming couplet, feel free. And it was really satisfying to write verses like that. And so I wrote tons and tons of them.

And I basically sang the ones that ended up meaning the most of me off of pages and pages of them that were in front of me. Some of them I felt embarrassed about. Some of them I wanted to keep. Some of them I thought we would edit out later. And none of those things happened. You know, like basically ended up keeping even the one about kicking a ball. at a tree to retrieve your frisbee, you know, like, which is, I was like, ah, that's got to go. And my kids are like, no, no, no, that's essential.

But it didn't seem like the song made sense unless there was a lot of them, you know. And it didn't seem like the punchline of the song, you know, sing a song that never ends. It seems like the more verses we put in that song, the more powerful that line ended up feeling. because you do get kind of lulled into this. Like live, we've played it live, and I've played it live solo a few times. And people always laugh when I sing that line because the tension of it being this kind of repetitive thing for a good six or seven minutes in a room,

it's a relief. It's not like that sounds really like giving myself a backhanded compliment or something. Yeah, it's a relief when that song's over. But there is a release, you know, not necessarily a relief. There's a release of that tension and it's satisfying. I want to talk about stray cats of Spain. I like this one because it seems to capture a moment where you realize that life, even in its smallest, maybe even throwaway moments,

that it's still pretty amazing. Sure. You know, it's a real story. It's definitely one of the more direct, at least to me, songs written about a specific thing. You know, Stray Cats were the first band I ever saw alive. Oh, wow. In a rock club, in a small rock club.

It was before they were a big, big act. So, Wilco is on tour in 2019 in Spain. We're playing a festival. We have a day off. day before the festival. Festivals going on right down the street from our hotel. So I walk over there, you know, because we have passes. And the stray cats are headlining the stage we're going to be playing on. So as I'm walking there, before I even knew the stray cats were playing, I was just marveling at all of the rockabilly people that were around me. What's going on?

What's going on? It's like everybody who's like dressed up in their tiger prints and their leather jackets and their pompadores and poodle skirts and they're all these like sort of middle-aged Spanish people like that are fully immersed in this thing. They're like the guys in the parking lot, you know, in the other song. You know, like it's just like this joyous sort of out of step with like a mainstream culture and a subculture that's sort of benign and and loving. You get the real sense that there's a positivity to it. There's a belonging to this, there's a community. And then I got to be immersed in that and also have this full circle moment watching the stray cats play basically the same set I saw them play 30 years earlier, however long ago.

Incredible. And so it takes, yeah. And it made me really, it made me really happy. It made me, it just seemed very, very poignant, very beautiful. And that song also, contains one of the lyrics that I would use to sum up a triple record, this triple, triple record, if I didn't make a triple record. And that is, it's not what you think unless it's hot pink. Why, why that? I don't know. I just think, I think that that's a key to life. You know, I think that there's a, there's just an excitement to that, I don't know. I don't know why it explains the record. I just think it's like, I just like it. I just think that it somehow gets at the core of what the record should be about.

One other interesting thing about that song is that moment happened. I remember out the song. We put the song out as one of the early tracks that people can listen to off the record. And went up on Instagram, social media. And Slim Jim Phantom, the drummer for the Strait Cats, commented. Wow. He said, you know, something like,

go get him, Jeff, you know, or, you know, rock on or like love with some hearts and stuff. And he's like, God, that made my day, you know. It's like the sweetest thing ever. Obviously, so many songs that we could keep talking about, but let's just jump to the one that you close with,

the song, Enough. You mentioned how so much of this record is maybe kind of a Roershock test, which I thought was interesting because enough is another one of those songs on the record that I took one way and I think maybe you meant another way. How did you take it? Well, the word enough and the idea of enough

is something I think about a lot because in some ways I see it as the root of all our problems. That it doesn't have to be. It could be a good thing. It could be a wonderful thing. But the drive to always want more and never have enough can lead to a lot of really all.

awful things. And so that was where I was at when I hit play on the song. But then after listening to it, I started thinking about it differently. Yeah, greed is the one thing that we don't talk about hardly at all in this culture. And to me, it's like, it's the prevailing problem. But to me, the song is, first of all, I thought it would be fun. to end a triple record with a song called Enough. But it was also at the beginning of the record at one point, you know. I think what it means to me at this point is that after all the rest of the record, the message kind of is it's really sad and really painful,

and I can't get enough of it this life, you know? Life is full of pain and sorrow and misery and over way too soon. Right. Exactly. This is a, you know, this, you know, the restaurant had terrible food and in small portions. Such small, so little of it, too. No, but I mean, there's a little bit of a joke and it sounds, you know, I don't know. It's just a reality.

I think it's just the reality of it. And that's kind of amazing, you know, because I think most people feel that way and it's really, really tragic. when someone loses that will to live. But most people have a strong will to live in spite of all of that sadness and suffering and inevitable suffering. That is extremely hopeful and powerful to me. It's the kind of thing that I don't,

I feel like we shouldn't allow ourselves to lose. it's really not the it's not the travail as much as the fact that even with the travail this is what I want

I want more of it I want this life I want to be here Jeff Tweedy talking about Twilight Override his new solo album a triple album so much more that we talked about

the I just didn't have time to include stuff around his creative process and workflow, especially. As you can imagine, he writes and records a lot. In fact, Jeff says that he has about two more albums worth of songs that didn't even make it on Twilight Override. But you know that drive to create and keep going and push himself, that's part of what he was talking about there at the end with the album's closing song, enough. And it's what I find so inspiring about Jeff and his work, especially Twilight Override. These songs, I think, are just such a powerful reminder of the things that matter most in our silly little lives and just how important it is to protect and nourish and grow those things.

Anyway, you'll find an edited transcript of this full conversation on our website if you want to spend some more time with it. NPR.org slash all songs. The album, Twilight Override from Jeff Tweedy, is out on September 20. I'm Robin Hilton. Thanks so much for listening. It's all songs considered from NPR Music.