Interview: Jeff Tweedy Talks About Tone, Songwriting, and the Importance of Imperfection

Jeff Tweedy’s Twilight Override tour is a bit of a rolling vintage guitar show. During a fall stop at the Boston club Royale, more than 25 guitars are onstage, a funky assortment of well-worn parlors, dreadnoughts, ’50s and ’60s acoustic-electrics, Martin nylon-strings, a one-of-a-kind 00 with a 12-string neck . . . plus various
Stratocaster, Telecaster, SG, and other solid-bodies—all from the vast collection Tweedy keeps at the Wilco loft in Chicago. Yet more guitars are on the tour bus, keeping the stage crew busy as instruments constantly go in and out of rotation, and everything needs to be set up with Tweedy’s preferred dead strings and an array of tunings. 

At center stage, dressed all in white, Tweedy switches instruments on nearly every song, as he and his band roll through an expansive concert drawn primarily from his new triple-album opus. Technically Twilight Override is a solo release, created apart from Tweedy’s intrepid band Wilco, but at the heart of Twilight Override is the extended family of musicians who are on this tour: Tweedy’s sons, Spencer and Sammy, along with their childhood friends and contemporaries Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, and Liam Kazar—all active and highly versatile musicians in their own right (Cunningham, Stewart, and Kazar trade off as openers). There’s something particularly sweet about this intergenerational combo, and it brings out a special kind of intimacy in Tweedy’s writing and performance.

For nearly 40 years, Tweedy has been breaking ground as a songwriter and guitarist—first with the alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo, and since 1994 with Wilco, which stirs together elements of folk, country, indie rock, and experimental music into its own signature stew. In between Wilco albums and tours, Tweedy dives into creating solo projects, writing books like World within a Song and How to Write One Song, and producing other artists. Twilight Override underscores not only how wildly prolific he is—it turns out that the triple album was whittled down from five albums of material—but how curious and forward looking he remains as an artist.

Backstage before soundcheck, I sat down with Tweedy for an extended conversation about the inspirations behind this latest burst of creativity—and his love of surprises and imperfections.

You always play plenty of acoustic guitar, but the new album feels like an especially deep dive into the instrument. Why did this project steer that way?

I do play a lot of acoustic in Wilco, and the solo records have skewed a little bit more acoustic than even Wilco. I write almost all songs on acoustic guitar—I’ve hardly ever written on anything else. 

But the inspiration for this record was to write a bunch of songs for these voices: my voice, Spencer and Sammy’s voices, along with Sima and Macie and Liam—the actual voices that I’ve taken out on the road to play the other solo records, and have come home with these beautiful vocal arrangements that weren’t on the records. So I started hearing those voices writing these songs, and it was really inspiring. I ended up writing a lot of material centered on this idea that if I had just those voices and an acoustic guitar, that would be enough. 

You told me once that with Wilco, you often deconstruct the guitar-and-voice versions of songs in the studio and reassemble them a different way. It sounds like that’s less the case with this project.

Less the case, but not completely devoid of that process. “Blank Baby” is a good example. It was actually kind of a waltz, and everything was pulled away except for the bass line once we put the vocals on, and then we built a different song around it. You can’t even really hear that it’s in three anymore. 

The guitar parts in many of these songs have a hypnotic feel, with one simple repeating pattern. In writing, do you start with those sorts of looping patterns and add melodies and words on top?

My observation about lyrics has been that the more complicated the chord progression, the more fragile it is to attach lyrics to it. There’s a reason catchy pop songs and things like that have simpler lyrics than, say, a Bob Dylan song. Dylan songs are really repetitive and generally not all over the place melodically. There are blues forms that are repetitive in that way, like there’s a type of droning blues, and some country music too—there are Hank Williams songs that are basically one chord. 

I’m freer to write more complicated imagery [over simpler music]. I feel like it’s going to be heard and processed. 

In general, the simpler the music is, the more likely it is that I started with lyrics; and the more complicated the music is, it’s more likely that the music was really enthralling to me and I tried to write lyrics that wouldn’t mess with it.

What’s an example of a song where the music led the way?

“Secret Door” is in 13, technically. That was really a fun time signature to play around with. I think the lyrics came after that, to try and not derail myself from counting 13.

Speaking of “Secret Door,” I’m curious about that muted guitar sound. 

I think it’s a Kay archtop with a rubber bridge and through an amp. The rubber bridge thing has gotten so crazy. I was an early adopter, but it’s a cool sound, and it’s definitely good for songwriting.

In general, you gravitate toward guitar sounds with less ring and sustain.

I use really dead strings and am kind of distracted by sustainy notes personally. It’s not a conscious thing initially, but I think it’s compatible with my voice. I haven’t written a whole lot of soaring melodies with a lot of sustained notes, and I tend to be speak-singing, like a lot of my heroes. 

As in Lou Reed. 

Yeah, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, a lot of people who don’t have traditionally impressive operatic voices or pop voices, but learned how to be themselves or give themselves permission to sound like themselves. In doing so, they created something that you can only get from that person, which is the whole idea of rock ’n’ roll to me: self-individuated expression and embracing this notion of self-liberation.

So the guitar sounds you seek out are meant to match how you sing?

I just think it made more sense. It’s probably also economics, to be honest with you, because when I started writing songs, I couldn’t afford strings very often. I didn’t have really great instruments to write with. I had a little Yamaha acoustic, and we had a Silvertone archtop in Uncle Tupelo that would live in the living room. I wrote tons of songs on guitars before I could ever touch a nice, ringing, beautifully voiced instrument. 

Speaking of hypnotic guitar parts, “One Tiny Flower” uses an open tuning drone. How did that song come to be?

It’s a tuning that I use quite often, D A D F♯ A D: dad-f-shad. It’s on lots of songs on [Wilco’s] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I think it makes its first appearance on some songs on Summerteeth, like “In a Future Age.” I tend to always have a guitar in that tuning.

I’m surprised you’re in open D in “One Tiny Flower.” The guitar part doesn’t have the very clear major sound typical of open D.

I’m probably drawn to there being something that undermines it a little bit. There are definitely some dissonant notes that I’m playing, and that adds to the tension. 

That song was live in the studio. We played it four or five times, and each time it was completely different. That was the whole point. We’ve played it every night on this tour so far, and it’s different each night. It has a shape, but it has room for what I consider to be reality. I want to include the things that aren’t easy to listen to. To me, the contrasts are what makes things beautiful. 

There’s a dark undercurrent in that song too, because the notion of the poem was that, of all the things that have happened in the world, this must have happened at some time: somebody thought that they would save a tiny flower, and jumped over it and fell down and hit their head and died. It is kind of a dark joke, but I’m sure it’s happened. 

When you’re performing a song with that kind of openness, do you talk through the approach with the band or just let it happen?

I don’t think we talk about it very much. I mean, my kids and I, that’s just what we do and what we’ve done since they were little kids—make noise sitting on the floor. I don’t really call it jamming, because that implies that there’s some blues scale being used, but it is improvising. 

A really lovely and gratifying thing is to go into the control room to listen and have it sound like something you could not make again if you tried. That’s like making a tree. You trusted that there’s this organic shape that happens when you put these elements together, and that you can make them alive. The only thing that would interfere with that is if somebody thought we were making a table [laughs], not a tree.

Is a lot of what we hear on this record the entire band in the studio playing live?

It’s about half and half, I think, of [live tracks and] things that I started with just Spencer and Sammy and me, or in some cases, just myself with a rhythm machine or something. Eventually, everybody’s on everything. 

With most of the songs, there was another layer of performance. A lot of the overdubs were done in groups. It wasn’t just one person out there doing the guitar part; it would be three people, with one person playing a piano and one person doing violin. 

Is your preference to have as much live interaction as you can?

My preference is, however it happens, for people to be able to close their eyes and picture it being something that happens in a room. The easiest way to do that is to actually make something happen in a room, and it’s becoming more and more meaningful and important to me to preserve the human element and mistakes and string squeaking and mishits on the snare. I just think that when there are things looming in our imaginations like AI and what it’s going to be able to accomplish, the more people you put in a room capable of being fallible, the less likely it is that a machine’s going to be able to emulate that. 

If you want to make something that’s already been made, and you want to make it perfectly, I absolutely see that that can happen already. I’m not a computer scientist, but I think the things that aren’t going to be replaced are the things in our real world and documenting what can happen in the real world, and then going out and playing it in the real world with people. If AI underlines how sacred that is, that’s a way to turn it into something I’m not afraid of.

AI aside, there’s an awful lot of music where people edit out all the loose edges and quantize the beats perfectly. 

Oh, yeah. In the last 20 or 30 years of music making, technology has allowed people to imagine that there’s an idealized version of something and a perfection to aspire to. I don’t have that gene. I don’t have much interest in it. 

I want emotion, and I want a song and a recording to communicate a real sense that there’s a consciousness on the other side of it, that a human made this. I think it’s a little bit disrespectful to imply that there’s no fallibility. I mean, I get pop music craft, and I love a lot of music that’s been toiled over and smoothed down to some kind of shiny thing, like Abba and things like that. I think they’re great. But I do also think that the material is what’s making it great more than the actual sheen of the recording.

Back on the subject of guitar, the songs on Twilight Override use a lot of low tunings. Do you reach for those because of how the guitar comes across in the lower register, or to suit your voice?

It allows me to access different voicings that I like. I use a lot of very simple chords and cowboy chords. One of the ways to get those to have rich voicings is to use them in a slightly different tuning or timbre. 

It is surprising how an A minor chord in lowered standard tuning just hits differently.

There’s an emotion to it. It feels like it’s fucking with time, you know, because it sounds like something slowed down a little bit. I’ve discovered that it’s on lots of records: half step down, whole step down, dropped-D tuning, dropped double-D tuning, all those things are kind of like the secret sauce on a lot of our favorite records.

On the topic of chord voicings, there’s one dissonant chord in “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” that’s particularly jarring and cool. How did that come to you?

It was probably an accident at first, and then, “Oh, that makes more sense. That sounds good.”

It’s an A♭ barre chord, and you just lift up [the barre] and let the B ring against an A♭. I just love the way that sounds. I gravitate towards those kind of intervals a lot, because it’s so satisfying when they resolve. 

Your songs often have unexpected twists in the chord progressions. Do you find those changes by hunting around the fingerboard?

As a listener, all I really want from somebody’s record is to not be bored and to be surprised. You can make something unexpected happen, and you can set people up for something unexpected to happen by making nothing happen for a while, you know? Those are all things I consider, and I definitely feel a little bit allergic to the stock chord or the chord I know everybody’s waiting for. A built-in way to surprise somebody is to just figure out a way to not use that chord. It’s not contrarianism. It’s just using what people already have as a vocabulary and expectation.

I’m guessing that choice is not really coming from theory. You’re not thinking, ooh, the flat six would be really cool to use right here.

I mean, I don’t not know theory. I’ve definitely come at theory from hearing it and then understanding it from having it explained to me, or being around a lot of musicians who do have a lot of theory background. I’m using it, but just because I’ve heard it. So it’s inspired by having ears and liking records and liking songs, and listening to a lot of them.

As you’re out touring with this band, how does the music change compared with what’s documented on the album?

It’s remarkably similar. It sounds very close to the record, except it has an added element that you can never get in a studio, the energy that comes from standing in front of people and sharing something vulnerable. There’s an energy that gets generated from that willingness to give back to each other, and that always makes things better to me. I love records, but there’s nothing that really compares with a great night onstage and the experience you can have with an audience.

This music feels very personal to me—the whole sound and the intimate nature of the songs and storytelling. Does it feel that way to you?

Yeah. I always hesitate to imply that Wilco doesn’t have that same element to me, because I do think there’s a lot of me and a lot of personal connection that I have with lyrics I’ve written for Wilco. But I do hear what you’re saying. There’s a directness that’s maybe not a part of Wilco as much. Wilco gets kind of absorbed into a band identity, and abstraction gets more valuable in that context. 

You know, everybody in this band I’ve known since they were little kids. Sima and Liam grew up a few blocks from where Spencer and Sammy grew up. So with my family in particular, you start at the place that is the absolute pinnacle of where you want to get as a musician, and that is a complete trust and intimacy and conviction that you’re not going to be judged. Wilco definitely has that, but it’s the starting point when you’re with your children and they’ve become talented musicians on their own; you’re starting at this extremely high level of trust. 

So I’d like to think that some of what you’re hearing isn’t necessarily just in the specifics of the lyrics, but in the ability to sing them with a conviction that is unadulterated with anybody else’s feeling in the room. You know, no matter how much you try, you’re always going to have your band as your audience and adapt and adjust yourself accordingly, emotionally. I don’t have any reason to not be as emotional as I want to be with my family and extended family of friends and friends of my children.

SIGNATURE SOUNDS

You won’t find many first-generation Martin 00DB Jeff Tweedy Signature guitars for sale—and with good reason. Produced from 2012–2019, the deep-bodied 00DB was a standout signature model for Martin, an homage not only to the Wilco frontman’s songwriting and fingerstyle but to the prewar mahogany 00-17 that first caught Tweedy’s eye in Willie Nelson’s hands back in the ’90s.

The 00DB was also among Martin’s early signature models built exclusively with FSC-certified tonewoods, another reason the company has brought the premium model back into production. Once you pull one from its elegant hard case and take in the rich finish, it’s easy to understand why these guitars have become so coveted.

A touch smaller than a classic 000 but with a deeper body, the 00DB delivers the immediacy, midrange focus, and detail we associate with smaller acoustics, backed by proper dreadnought thump and big, piano-like single notes. It’s never brash or woofy, likely owing to the naturally mellow character of its mahogany top, back, and sides. While it responds well to a flatpick, it truly shines with fingers and thumbpicks, producing a warm, coppery voice that feels quintessentially Martin—even if, like me, dreadnoughts are usually your home base.

Despite its 00 body, the 00DB sports a full 25.4-inch scale length and a mahogany Modified-V neck with a satin finish, so D-28 players will feel immediately at home. The 1-3/4-inch nut width is a pleasure for larger hands. A joy to record, the new 00DB ranks among the finest studio guitars I’ve played—something to bear in mind when weighing its $3,599 street price, which may well appreciate while earning its keep in the studio.

Martin’s new Jeff Tweedy 000 Jr E acoustic-electric, which sells for $1,149, naturally doesn’t aim for that same level of refinement, but it offers plenty to recommend it. Built around an FSC-certified sapele body, it includes Martin E1 electronics, an onboard soundhole tuner, and the same 1-3/4-inch nut width as its big brother, paired with a comfortable 24.9-inch short scale.

It’s a capable recording and stage guitar that takes well to amplification and is clearly designed for travel. Kudos to Martin, too, for including a rugged, supportive softshell case—among the best I’ve encountered. At this price point, it’s well worth a look. —James Volpe Rotondi

HOW TWEEDY GETS HIS TONES

Among the guitars on Jeff Tweedy’s Twilight Override tour are a number of vintage parlor models, including an early ’30s Martin 0-18, two Martin 00-18e acoustic-electrics from the late ’50s and early ’60s, and an early ’30s Gibson LG-2. Tweedy often reaches for smaller body guitars because, he says, “They have a clearer, tighter low end and midrange response that sounds more musical to me.”

Tweedy does use dreadnoughts and jumbos as well. On the Twilight Override tour he plays a 1940s Martin D-18, known as Hank 2 for its similarity to Hank Williams’ guitar (Tweedy has another guitar dubbed Hank 1, a D-28 from the same period). Hank 2 is in standard tuning down a whole step for the new songs “Western Clear Skies,” “KC Rain (No Wonder),” “Sign of Life,” and “Betrayed.”

Also on the tour are two Martin nylon-strings, a 1966 00-18C and a 1953 00-18G, and the Frankenstein guitar nicknamed 2112: a 1958 Martin 00-21 with a 12-string neck grafted on in the ’60s. Tweedy raves about this guitar and uses it in open-D tuning on “One Tiny Flower.” 

All the steel-string acoustics have D’Addario EJ16 phosphor bronze strings, and stage manager Ashwin Deepankar goes to great lengths to make new strings sound old. At the Wilco loft, he removes 400 to 500 sets of strings at a time from their packaging, hangs them to let them oxidize for about 18 months, rubs coconut oil on them, and eventually repacks the tarnished strings to bring them on tour.

Most of the acoustics have Sunrise pickups (aside from the 00-18e guitars, which have original DeArmond magnetic pickups). Because the output levels of Tweedy’s sundry guitars vary so widely, Deepankar has devised a system that allows Tweedy to control them individually on his acoustic pedalboard. All guitars plug into a mono input on a Radial Shotgun splitter, which sends the signal to four outputs: designated as 12-string, dreadnought, 0-18/parlor, and effects. Each output has a volume pedal (three mini Black Mountain pedals and one Moyo) and its own Neve RNDI-M preamp. The effects channel goes to an Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Nano reverb and a 1954 Fender Deluxe amp. Also in the acoustic pedalboard for all instruments is a TC Electronic Polytune 3 Noir. —JPR