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The true confessions of Wilco’s frontman. How Jeff Tweedy learned to stop worrying about worrying.

Jeff Tweedy warms to the subject, plus Georgia Anne Muldrow, Ryley Walker, The 1975 and many more.

Jeff Tweedy ★★★★ Warm DBPM. CD/DL/LP

JEFF TWEEDY is not, by most measures, a typical voice of a generation. It’s hard to find many battle cries or manifestos in his 30-year career. A melodrama of broad strokes, a sense of life being reduced to crude simplicities, has rarely been his style. In his songs for Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, and now on his own solo records, he’s always grasped that the truth is somewhat more nuanced and ambiguous. Nevertheless, for an audience mostly too sceptical to think they ever needed a hero, and certainly too old and wise to go looking for one nowadays, Tweedy has grown into an important role. He is, at 51, the arch-poet of self-effacement, a singer-songwriter who understands his people crave sincerity and authenticity, while often not wanting to admit as much. “It’s hard to say/What I’ve been through/Should matter to you,” he sings in Bombs Above, the opening track on Warm, his first solo album of new songs. But what he has been through, and the questions he asks, are critical to a fanbase experiencing the most universal mid-life crises. How do you tackle mortality and enduring love in a real and humane way, without sounding sentimental? Or: now that the kids have grown up, your parents have passed and your wife’s seen off cancer for a second time, how do you articulate a sentimentality that won’t betray your punk rock adolescence? This is the backstory to Warm – and, indeed, to Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy’s memoir that is being published simultaneously (see review in MOJO 301). The book is as frank and engaging as you might imagine, mixing self-deprecatory nods to “the power of sad mid-tempo rock” with brutal discussions of band politics, addiction, and the hard work of making art. It also, though, acts as a kind of 300-page footnote to Warm, a means to explain, “some of the most direct, personal and autobiographical [songs] I’ve ever written.” Don’t Forget, for instance, appears to be an optimistic song about death; a pedalsteel-shaded jaunt advising loved ones that, while, “We all think about dying/Don’t let it kill you.” It’s one of Tweedy’s best and catchiest songs in years: breezy, openhearted, a consolatory hug to provide succour and perspective through the hard times. Its specific roots, though, are signalled by the lines, “I won’t forget the long drive/We arrived in time to say goodbye.” In the summer of 2017, his extended family gathered in their hometown of Belleville, Illinois, as Tweedy’s father entered the final phase of lung cancer. When Bob Tweedy’s condition suddenly deteriorated, his son drove five hours back to Chicago to fetch his own younger son, Sammy. They arrived half an hour before Bob Tweedy died; time enough to sing I Shall Be Released at the bedside, and Hummingbird, Tweedy Sr’s favourite Wilco song. For most of his career, Jeff Tweedy tended to avoid anything quite so straightforward; emotional content was implicit rather than conscientiously elucidated. But since 2014’s Sukierae – a collaboration with his drumming elder son, Spencer, released under the bandname of Tweedy – he has increasingly focused on paring away at his craft. On Wilco’s Star Wars, Schmilco and now most strikingly on Warm, Tweedy appears enraptured by the possibilities of an unadorned, unfettered mode of expression. If he addressed painkiller dependency on 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, it was allusively: the dense 15-minute drone piece, Less Than You Think, synthesized the migraines which would drive Tweedy to over-medicate. Now, on Having Been Is No Way To Be, he is unflinching. “From time to time I’d watch you sleep,” he sings to his wife, “And I’m sorry when you wake up to me.” Later, he sarcastically parrots fans who wish he’d start taking drugs again, if only to make his records sound more like they used to. Tweedy’s current aesthetic, though, militates against such an obvious move. As his lyrics have pivoted towards clarity, so have his recording choices – both on his own projects, and on the albums he’s produced for Joan Shelley, Richard Thompson, Low and others in recent years. His signature sound, which reaches a new peak on Warm, might best be described as radical verité, where every creak and squeak of his 1930s Martin 0-18 acoustic is preserved, even fetishised, in the mix. In his memoir, he talks about preferring demos to finished songs for being closer to the sounds “rattling around my subconscious”. The outstanding How Hard It Is For A Desert To Die feels like a man, prone to over-analysis, capturing a song as close to its point of creation as possible. Not spontaneity, exactly, but the odd uncertain note, and the voice which Tweedy thinks “is flawed and sounds jarring when surrounded by too much virtuosity or precision”, feels more powerful and human for being so exposed. It isn’t, in fact, that far removed from how Tweedy made music at the very start of his career. With folksy, cranky sing-alongs like Let’s Go Rain or the haunted songwriters’ koan of the title track, it’s possible to trace a line from Warm back to the ur-Americana of Uncle Tupelo (Tweedy himself admits an affinity between Don’t Forget and their 1993 barn-burner, No Sense In Lovin’). In this light, the creative swerves made by Tweedy over the intervening 25 years start looking a lot less surprising, and the long path that leads to Warm emerges as almost logical. It’s a journey beyond self-consciousness and towards mature vulnerability, to an evolved idea of what is musically pure. It’s about an age-old trick of writing small, explicitly personal songs that strike chords with multitudes. “I had a bone-crushing earnestness, a weaponised sincerity,” Tweedy writes of his earliest songwriting attempts. Three decades on, he still has. And by most measures, that’s heroic.

“Warm is about an age-old trick of writing small, explicitly personal songs that strike chords with multitudes.”