A Song For Friday: Jeff Tweedy
Twilight Override is a quietly majestic triple album. Also: Geese, HUMAN ERROR CLUB, Mulatu Astatke, MICHELLE, Automatic, Misha Salkind-Pearl, Gideon Broshy, Chris Williams, and Cristina Lord
Books have already been written about Wilco, the Chicago-born Alt-Country/Americana/Art Rock band that Jeff Tweedy has led since 1994. Heck, Tweedy has written some books himself, including “A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.” So I’m not going to recount the history of this incredible band, or even of Tweedy’s solo career, except to say that I’m one of the few who put Sukierae, the album he made as Tweedy with his son Spencer in 2014, on my best of the decade list after calling it “as convincing a display of his casual mastery as we’re likely to get.”
Sukierae was a double album. Now, here we are a decade later, and Tweedy has released a triple album, the 30-track Twilight Override, which is further evidence that he’s one of the greatest songwriters of all time. He also knows his way around the studio, co-producing the album with Tom Schick in the Wilco loft, with Spencer on drums, keyboards, and guitars, and his younger son, Sammy, on keyboards. He also gets help from James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, and Liam Kazar, leading to a variety of textures and depths, maintaining crucial variety throughout the nearly two-hour length of the album.
Depending on your level of interest in rattling and rambling around Tweedy’s attic of songs, you will be forgiven if you break Twilight Override up into three sessions for listening. I find it gripping throughout, with moments that enrapture with their spare beauty or surprise with their multilayered and explosive production framing yet another well-crafted song. After the jaw-dropping opening track, One Tiny Flower, which immediately joins the freak-folk hall of fame, another quintessential moment shows up on track five, Love Is For Love.
Because it was made by Jeff, Spencer, and Sammy alone, it’s the perfect song to focus on here. With Jeff’s acoustic strumming and picking accompanied by Sammy’s Yamaha VSS30 synth and Spencer’s drums, played with brushes and so rhythmically locked to the guitar that you barely hear them as a separate element, the song immediately establishes a windswept and deeply emotional mood. After three verses of plainspoken wisdom sung in his gorgeously weathered voice, Jeff blows the song open with new chords and guitar solos that put the song into a new dimension of dynamics and color. It’s hard to imagine the conscious mind coming up with such a series of interludes. It’s like a perfectly executed instinct, which should be oxymoronic, but it’s just Tweedy being Tweedy.
As for the “plainspoken wisdom,” one line that immediately jumped out was:
Let’s celebrate
For another year
Hunt and kill
Another hollow fear
There are brilliant lines like that all over the album, and others that perhaps reveal the craft behind the art a bit too obviously. But that’s been true of recent Wilco albums, too, and I take it as an inspiration to be kinder to myself in the midst of my own creative pursuits. After all, Tweedy is guy that almost gave the game away in his second book, How To Write One Song. I guess he thought no one would read it if he called it How To Write 30 Songs, but for that story look no further than the quietly majestic Twilight Override.
Listen to most of the songs for Friday here or below.
Also Out This Week
Geese - Getting Killed It’s been kind of fun to see some of the online discourse around Geese vocalist Cameron Winter’s solo debut, Heavy Metal, which came out last December. While there were those of us who were prepped and (mostly) ready for his wildly eclectic debut, others were taken by surprise and then delighted to find out that the guy has a band that had already released two albums. Such is the state of music discovery in 2025. Hopefully, newcomers dug into that back catalog, which contains Projector (2021), the very fine post-punk flavored debut, and 2023’s 3D Country, which turned a fractured and funky lens on disparate sounds of the 70s, like prog rock, avant-garde folk, and blue-eyed soul.
On Getting Killed, such genre tags do not apply—it just sounds like Geese, which means busy rhythmic underpinnings, tangled guitars, bold keyboards, and Winter’s multi-octave voice, often moving at juggernaut speed. When they slow down, all of those elements contribute to riveting exercises in tension and release. When I included 3D Country in my Best Of 2023 (So Far), I noted that the band had two stars, Winter and Emily Green, a spectacular guitarist. That may still be so in concert, but here they sound even more like one unit. While Winter’s voice can dominate, I find myself barely thinking about individual instruments but rather the whole sound, with the rhythm section of Dominic DiGesu (bass) and Max Bassin (drums) perfectly enmeshed with Green and Winter. This could partly be due to the band going from a quintet to a foursome with the departure of second guitarist Hudson Foster. Whatever the reason, Getting Killed feels like their purest expression yet. Geese is on an extensive tour. Go get killed at a concert if you can.
HUMAN ERROR CLUB and Kenny Segal - HUMAN ERROR CLUB AT KENNY’S HOUSE In which a post-Madlib jazz trio (Diego Gaeta and Jesse Justice, keyboards, and Makala Session, drums) connects with another great hip hop producer for a mostly chill collection of vignettes filled with shimmering, squelching, and sky-writing synths, Rhodes, and other keyboards, and knotty drum patterns. Some songs include verses by Quelle Chris, Cavalier, E L U C I D, Moor Mother, Billy Woods, and others, showing off a pretty sweet Rolodex. One of the instrumental guests is Shabaka Hutchings, who gave up his titanic sax career to pursue the flute exclusively, and sounds more heated and convincing here than I’ve heard from him before on that instrument. Worth the price of admission, even if all too brief.
Mulatu Astatke - Mulatu Plays Mulatu Running through many classics from his career, the 81-year-old father of Ethio-Jazz puts a big band through its paces in a masterful and relaxed victory lap. Astatke’s vibraphone sparkles on many tracks, and the recording richly displays his ever-intriguing blend of jazz and traditional Ethiopian instrumentation. Mulatu Plays Mulatu is a perfect introduction to his work, and if you want to see what happens when he’s pushed a little harder, check out the collaboration with The Heliocentrics that made my first Top 10 ever in 2009.
MICHELLE - Kiss/Kill Earlier this year, this dance-pop-R&B sextet announced its breakup. This was sad news for anyone who enjoyed their delightful albums and joyous concerts, and now they seem intent on making us miss them more with six fun songs in their patented style. They even expand on it with Water On The Floor, which would not sound out of place on a playlist with ESG and Liquid Liquid. Who knows - maybe we’ll get six solo projects that will be equally enjoyable. A fan can dream…
Automatic - Is It Now? On their third album (and first in three years), the LA-based trio of Izzy Glaudini (synths, vocals), Halle Saxon (bass, vocals), and Lola Dompé (drums, vocals) has gone from a tidy synth-pop combo to a dance-floor-slaying machine. Saxon and Dompé seem to enter an altered state, acting as one inseparable creature of rhythm. Or maybe the altered state is all mine, as the mesmeric vocals weave through the grooves and the synths push on to parts unknown. Yes, Automatic, it is now. It is your time.
Mischa Salkind-Pearl - Lines And Traces Of Desire: Music For Cimbalom There’s a pleasing sense of disorientation in these compositions stemming from the rich, mysterious tones of the cimbalom, a large hammered dulcimer from Hungary. Played with a flair beyond mere virtuosity by Nicholas Tolle, the instrument sounds right at home whether solo or alongside a soprano (Mary Bonhag), a violin (Lilit Hartunian), or amidst the Ludovico Ensemble. You may reconsider everything you thought you knew about the Cimbalom after supping from this luxurious feast.
Gideon Broshy - Nest Alternating between tracks that are spiky and bright and others that are lush and expansive, this debut album from Broshy, a New York-based pianist, composer, and producer, is an almost purely textural experience. And what textures! Building up sounds from acoustic instruments, including harpsichords, celestas, dulcimers (including a Yangqin played by Mantawoman from the Silk Road Ensemble), pianos, clarinet (Gleb Kanasevich from Hub New Music), and percussion (the great Matt Evans), Broshy manipulates and shapes the sounds with synthesizers and software, with the results sounding like all those instruments and none of them. Whether seeking invigoration or peace, Nest is an environment you’ll want to revisit often.
Chris Williams - Odu Vibration ii Recorded at what must have been a heckuva night at Roulette (where was I??), this album features improvisations by Williams (trumpet, synth), Patrick Shiroishi (saxophone, effects), and Kalia Vandever (trombone, effects), and feels like a true meeting of the minds. With drones below and horns above, you’ll easily find space for your own mind as you follow every thread the players pull, from gentle tendrils to blasts of noise.
Cristina Lord - If It All Falls The sense of a quest into the heart of electro-acoustic music—which is, after all, a search for balance between flesh and technology—pervades this wonderful record. Los Angeles may be home for Lord, a composer and electronic musician, but her destination seems to be Jon Hassell’s Fourth World, especially on Go Quietly, which opens with breathy sounds and pulsating percussion. When an insect-like sound (a guiro, maybe?) counters the rhythm, the sense of a cyber-tropics is complete. If It All Falls is full of such surprises, like vines slowly throttling a power plant and producing fascinating sounds in the process.
Note: The graphic above is based on a photo by Shervin Lainez
From The Archives
Best Of 2022: The Top 25
A Song For Friday: Wilco
Wilco’s Star Power
The Wilco Diaspora, Part 1
The Wilco Diaspora, Part 2: Tweedy & Son