Over the course of a 30-year career spanning Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, various collaborations and now Tweedy, singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy has written an unbelievable number of songs.
While he’s never churned out albums in quick succession, the sustaining quality of his output is truly staggering.
After taking a break following Wilco’s The Whole Love (2011),he returned in 2014 with Tweedy – a quasi-solo project formed with his 18-year-old son, Spencer. The band’s debut double LP Sukierae landed in September that year, andjust ten months later Wilco surprised everyone with their ninth album, Star Wars, suggesting Jeff has landed in a creative purple patch.
“There are a few things that I think have really contributed to me being able to work a lot more efficiently than I have in the past,” Tweedy says. “There’s some practical reasons – the studio that we put together over the years is pretty dialled in now. And my favourite person to work with in the studio, Tom Schick, moved to Chicago a few years ago so that we can just keep working on records. So I get to go there every day and make something, and that’s the reason there’s so much stuff now. There’s a whole ’nother Wilco record done and it’s probably going to come out sometime this year.
“There’s that, and also my kids are old enough to be young adults now. I think that frees up a lot of mental space to work. They’re a lot more demanding on your time when they’re younger and you feel like you really need to be there. And I feel like I still am there for them, but they’re a lot more autonomous and I think that has given back a certain amount of energy to each day for my own pursuits.”
Gaining additional mental and temporal freedom doesn’t necessarily mean one will experience a burst of creative energy. But Tweedy doesn’t require strict self-discipline to launch into songwriting.
“It’s the thing I really want to do,” he says. “It’s the sustaining thing in my life. It’s a constant. I look at it like a really good job, and it’s the part of the job that does the most for me. I like disappearing into the creative process and forgetting about the records I’ve made in the past and the person that people think I am – the persona that’s projected onto me. Getting immersed in a new piece of music is miraculous. It still works the same way it did when I was 14 years old. I feel lucky that I get to stay connected to that.”
Sukierae differs from a Wilco record in some obvious ways. For starters, Jeff plays the majority of instruments. The only other band member is Spencer, whose intuitive, jazz-inflected drumming forms a core part of the record’s identity. However, it’s not miles away from Wilco, chiefly because of Jeff’s unguarded vocal timbre, characteristic use of melody and accessible yet poetically ambiguous lyrics. In fact, it’s by virtue of his vocal familiarity that Wilco have been able to carry out such frequent stylistic exploration over the years without massively upsetting listeners. It’s also freed the frontman from having to keep to a supposed songwriting signature.
“I know that there are artists and friends of mine that do that – that have specific types of things they’ll do with certain projects and they have parameters that maybe make it easier to write within the confines of a certain project. But for me, the whole idea is to surprise yourself and have freedom and limitless creativity. And if anything, the pre-established ideas of what your music is should be averted. It’s exciting to play with that preconception, because you can surprise people if you work against it. But more than anything, I just don’t think about it. I just want to make something that I like and am excited by.”
Given he’s already a fairly unrestrained creator, stepping away from Wilco to make Sukierae led Tweedy to a more impulsive approach to song construction. “There was some freedom in playing all of the instruments,” he says. “It was liberating to eliminate a certain amount of committee in seeing things through in an arrangement. You could move much faster playing all the instruments by yourself. With a six-piece band it takes a long time for everybody to find their way into a song or find their way around who’s going to get to play what frequencies. That’s one of my only frustrations ever in the studio – when things are moving slow. I really am joyous when things are moving fast. I’m pretty neurotic when things slow down.”
He may have relished the added studio freedom, but Tweedy can’t play everything himself onstage. He and Spencer recruited a bunch of old friends to form the Tweedy touring band, which visits Australia this month.
“We just put together a great group of people to hang out with, who happened to be great musicians. It’s what any band should be. It’s what Wilco is – Wilco’s a great group of musicians that are fun to hang out with. I guess I did it enough in my life where it wasn’t that much fun and there were personalities that subtracted from the overall positivity of the experience, but at this point in my life it’s really intolerable to deal with anything less than that.”
[Tweedy photo by Piper Ferguson]
Tweedy perform at theFactory Theatre on Tuesday March 22, thenBluesfest 2016,Thursday March 24 – Monday March 28 at Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm.
