In short
Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) discusses his new triple album Twilight Override (30 songs), a “documentary” style recording focused on time, aging, fear, persistence, and community in an era of fast, flattened culture. He explains the album’s title as overriding dread about endings, organizing the three discs as past/present/future, and using singing as a way to ground himself and counter panic.
Guest backgrounds
Jeff Tweedy is the Chicago alt-country/rock songwriter and Wilco frontman (formed 1994), now also releasing solo books and records. Amanda Petrusich is a music critic for The New Yorker and interviews him.
Key claims
Triple length is a defiant response to short attention spans; real community matters more than internet “conformity”; recording should preserve real room sounds (fingers, squeaks, buzzes) and group vocals; songwriting functions like self-discovery/therapy.
Notable examples
“Cry Baby Cry” recorded in his Dublin hotel room with windows open; “Lou Reed was my babysitter” referencing Loaded (and Doug Yule’s vocals); lyric “Dance right into the light” as a counter to fear of dying; he mentions working with Mavis Staples and her joy.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring Jeff Tweedy's Artistic Journey
0:45 to 2:20
A discussion about Jeff Tweedy's evolution as a musician and his latest album.
“a triple album and a gorgeous, thoughtful meditation on time, aging, fear, and persistence.”
Recording Techniques and Sound Quality
2:20 to 4:59
Tweedy shares insights on his recording process and the importance of authenticity.
“I have always gravitated towards the style of recording that's kind of documentary almost.”
The Concept Behind a Triple Album
4:59 to 8:07
Discussion on the creative choice to release a triple album and its significance.
“I'm curious kind of how that came to be.”
Personal Influences and Inspirations
8:07 to 12:18
Tweedy reflects on personal influences in his music and the impact of Lou Reed.
“I mean, does it feel that way for you, too?”
Personal Influences and Inspirations
14:38 to 15:11
Tweedy reflects on personal influences in his music and the impact of Lou Reed.
“There are things in life that you don't want to be transparent, like your swimsuit or your search history.”
Introducing Clock It Podcast
15:22 to 16:31
Simone Sanders Townsend and the host discuss their podcast Clock It!
“Availability, speed, and coverage varies.”
Exploring the Album Title and Concept
16:31 to 18:12
Jeff Tweedy discusses the meaning behind the album title 'Twilight Override'.
“And you wrote a little in the album release notes about the word twilight, which I agree is a beautiful word and a sort of melancholic idea too.”
Parenting and Legacy in Music
18:12 to 20:44
Tweedy shares insights on being a parent and passing on musical knowledge.
“I don't know, taking a minute to say like, hey, thanks for being here.”
Reflections on Aging and Time
20:44 to 22:32
Tweedy reflects on aging, time, and the impact of personal experiences.
“We talked a little bit about – you spoke a little bit about aging.”
The Impact of the Pandemic on Perspectives
22:32 to 24:28
Discussion on how the pandemic has changed perceptions of time and trauma.
“Or like that shock to the system seems to have really reset our relationship with time.”
Show all 15 chapters
Songwriting as Self-Discovery
24:28 to 26:40
Tweedy talks about how songwriting can lead to self-discovery and healing.
“I think maybe you sort of get led back towards like maybe it's actually this thing.”
The Journey of Life and Music
26:40 to 28:01
Tweedy discusses the journey of life, resilience, and the power of music.
“Which is kind of interesting because some of the first things that we probably have to read were maybe written down with a melody in mind.”
Reflections on Resilience and Joy
28:01 to 29:43
Jeff Tweedy discusses the resilience of others and the joy that comes from music and history.
“I've seen people facing circumstances much more harrowing than I'll have probably ever faced in my life with a lot more resolve and fearlessness.”
The Poetic Essence of Love
29:43 to 31:21
Tweedy shares poignant lyrics that reflect on love and longing in his music.
Announcement of New Album and Closing Remarks
31:21 to 31:49
Discussion about the release of Tweedy's new album and final thoughts from the hosts.
“And I'm not going anywhere Jeff Tweedy's Twilight Override comes out this month.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Jeff Tweedy:This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08Amanda Petrusich:This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Amanda Petrusich is a music critic for The New Yorker, and recently she sat down in our studio to talk with and hear some songs from Jeff Tweedy, one of the great songwriters working today.
0:26Jeff Tweedy:Jeff Tweedy is probably best known as the lead singer of Wilco, the band he formed in Chicago in 1994 as pioneers in the alt-country wave. In recent years, he's been working more often as a solo artist, putting out both books and records under his own name. This month, he's releasing Twilight Override, a triple album and a gorgeous, thoughtful meditation on time, aging, fear, and persistence. We're currently living through a moment in which cross-pollination between genres is incredibly commonplace But for me, when I first heard Wilco, I was floored by the ways in which Tweedy combined a kind of punk scrappiness With that lonesome, yearning, country sound It spoke to the parts of me that were angry, the parts of me that were sad And the parts of me that were ecstatic just to be alive Doing all the dumb, goofy, transcendent things humans do His work still feels that way to me, as though it contains everything.
1:49on drugs, crawling on the ground.
1:54Amanda Petrusich:Love is for love.
1:58Jeff Tweedy:I want to just start by saying that I really, really love these songs. I find them incredibly tender and searching and close, and I think sort of inherent to the way they were recorded. And I'm curious if that quality, that closeness, was something you were purposefully working toward in the studio or sort of how you got that sound on this?
2:20Amanda Petrusich:I have always gravitated towards the style of recording that's kind of documentary almost. I want there to be elements where you feel like you can hear someone's fingers or you can hear that it's a sound that was actually made in a room. All the things that I think are going to get harder and harder to fake. I don't know. Like when you play guitar, you don't really – you can play the notes correctly. But you almost don't have any control over the squeaks and the buzzes and things like that. And to me, that's the beauty of it. It's like it's not going to be exactly the same every time. And I don't know.
3:05Amanda Petrusich:I love it. Same with the voices. I want – you know, they're not affected in a lot of ways. And there's a lot of group singing around one microphone and a lot of choral singing on the record, which was important to me, too.
3:18Jeff Tweedy:The opening of Cry Baby Cry almost sounds like it was recorded in the back room of a bar. What is that? It sounds like a party.
3:27Amanda Petrusich:Cry baby cry
3:34Jeff Tweedy:Stare up deep in the night
3:40Amanda Petrusich:I know you try
3:47Amanda Petrusich:But you never get it right
3:55Amanda Petrusich:So cry, baby cry It was recorded in my hotel room in Dublin across the river from the bars getting out in downtown Dublin. And so those people were all the way, like at least a block away that you can hear. It was a nice night, so I had the windows open. I honestly, to begin with, we did both. We overdubbed on the one I recorded in my hotel room, and then we recorded a whole new one in the studio. And I kind of liked them both. And then we stumbled upon that transition that feels really satisfying to me where all of the ambience kind of goes away and you're in a different room in a different time, you know.
4:59Jeff Tweedy:It's a triple album, 30 songs. I'm curious kind of how that came to be. And are you always writing this much material?
5:07Amanda Petrusich:It's whittled down from five albums.
5:10Jeff Tweedy:This is, in fact, the condensed soup. This is the edited version of it.
5:14Amanda Petrusich:I like going to work every day, and I like having a practice of writing. And that tends to provide a lot of material. There was an inspiration to make a triple record. You know, just kind of like just to fly in the face of how short everything is getting and how fast everybody wants everything to be. You don't have to listen to it, you know, in one sitting. I think the songs hopefully stand on their own. But I do like the idea of giving someone almost two hours to kind of be pulled along by an outpouring of songs, you know.
5:55Jeff Tweedy:It feels almost like there's a little bit of a punk rock, you know, a thread of defiance through this, which is almost a sort of resistance to modern life or kind of the way we consume culture now.
6:10Amanda Petrusich:You know, it's driven by a belief in individuated self-expression and that that's a really essential part of rock and roll. It's an essential part of art, in my opinion. And it's a continuation of an art form to me that is defiant. It grows out of a music that was formed around the inspiration and genius of probably the least free of our fellow citizens. And I think that's what resonates to me still is that it's like the best expression of what the dream of America, an American ideal would be. You know, the individualism, the liberty to be yourself, to think freely. I don't know. It's not just America.
7:00Amanda Petrusich:The world pushes against that, I think. But when you think about how the Internet works, it really is like a conformity machine. You know, it's like really efficient. It flattens everything.
7:11Jeff Tweedy:Yeah.
7:12Amanda Petrusich:I see the value in it. I see the value in people finding each other and how lonely it can be. But I don't think it supplants real community in a way that is beneficial to people. And I think that we should get better at forming communities. And that's what this record is also to me is spending time just basking in a little community, you know, that we've put together for this band that actually feels like it's a part of a bigger community in the Wilco fan base and my fan base. And, you know, that's another reason it's triple record. In a lot of ways, it's like, oh, if you're in, you're in. You know, you want to be with us?
7:57Amanda Petrusich:Let's catch up.
7:59Jeff Tweedy:Yeah. And the size, too, feels significant but necessary. Like, as you were saying, the sort of vastness of it feels like an essential part of how it works. Each track kind of feels like it's in conversation with what happens before and what happens after. I mean, does it feel that way for you, too? Like if you took one song off.
8:15Amanda Petrusich:Yeah, I've made single records that feel longer to me. And I'm not saying I'm proud of those records. I just think that I've made records that have an intensity to them that kind of wears you out a little bit.
8:26Jeff Tweedy:Which ones are you thinking of?
8:28Amanda Petrusich:I mean, to me, even Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has an intensity to it that feels sort of all at once when you listen through it. It can be laborious if you're not in the mood for the whole, I don't know, to just be in that world for that long. This one doesn't feel long to me at all.
8:48Jeff Tweedy:I did want to ask you a little bit, when you're writing, how soon in the process you sort of know whether this will be a solo song or a song that could be on a Wilco record?
8:59Amanda Petrusich:In general, anything I write can kind of end up anywhere. I did specifically write a lot of these songs for these voices that I knew I was going to sing them with and really challenged myself to sing songs that had longer held notes. It's not something I'd gravitate towards. So and I think there's a subject matter that comes easier to me and thinking about it in the context of a solo record than in the identity of a band. You know, I don't think that I've shied away from having personal topics on Woco Records and things that I relate to deeply. But there's something a little bit more autobiographical and willing to share it as not as a character.
9:48Amanda Petrusich:But, you know, this is just me singing.
9:51Jeff Tweedy:Are there particular songs or artists or albums that you think, well, this is a panacea for me. This works whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed or freaked out.
10:00Amanda Petrusich:Well, yeah, Lou Reed was my babysitter as a song on the record. And it's because I had Loaded when I was nine years old or something. It was part of the record collection I inherited from my brother. And I've been listening to that record almost 50 years, you know. And I'm still sort of captivated by it. When I was growing up especially, it wasn't revered as like an important Velvet Underground record. The fact that Doug Yule sings a bunch of songs that, you know, took me years to figure out it's not Lou Reed.
10:33Jeff Tweedy:Yeah. Yeah, me too, actually. Can I ask you to play a little bit of Velvet Underground song?
10:40Amanda Petrusich:Uh, I...
10:57Amanda Petrusich:Who loves the sun? Who cares that it makes showers Who cares what it's done Since you broke my heart Oh my God.
11:14Jeff Tweedy:So beautiful.
11:16Amanda Petrusich:That's such a cool song.
11:18Jeff Tweedy:Lou Reed was my babysitter is also one of my favorite songs on this record. But on that song you're really channeling Lou and not just sort of in your phrasing and delivery but I think as you were saying in that song's kind of freedom and attitude.
11:32Amanda Petrusich:I want to sweat next to you. Sweat next to you with the sticky carpet sucking on my shoes. It's rock and roll ain't never gonna lose. Nuh-uh.
Read the full transcript
11:48Amanda Petrusich:I want you to dance into me. Spill my drink. I want to feel the kick kicking in my teeth. My bleeding heart bleeding to the beat
12:03Look out
12:05Amanda Petrusich:Jeff Tweedy talking with Amanda Petrosich of The New Yorker More in a moment
12:14Jeff Tweedy:WNYC Studios is supported by Monarch When I think about my relationship to money The phrase that comes to mind is superstitious dread As a freelancer, my income is, shall we say, variable And that can be scary My financial education as a child was mostly limited to my parents yelling about it, so as with most scary, unpleasant concepts, my lifelong tactic has been avoidance. I'm aware that this is no way for a grown-up to act, and that's why Monarch has been a game-changer. Monarch helps me face my fears by putting all my income and spending information into one place and making that information easy to digest, even for me.
12:47Jeff Tweedy:The diagrams make it crystal clear where my money is going. It really demystifies the scary things, like setting financial goals and budgets. I can ask his AI assistant questions like, can I afford this vacation or this fancy jar of face cream? It's like having a financial advisor in my pocket, and that's helped me reach my most important financial goal of all, banishing the fear and getting my money on track. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code NEWYORKER at MONARCH.COM to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at MONARCH.COM with code NEWYORKER.
13:20Jeff Tweedy:WNYC Studios is supported by Shopify. Do you have a business idea? Well, Shopify is here to take that little light bulb going off above your head right now and turn it into reality. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready to go from day one. I'm cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein, and I thought I was intimidated by anything having to do with business and or the internet. But Shopify is so simple and intuitive that even a Luddite scribbler like me found my way around. I click start my trial, and I see these friendly little pop-up buttons, add your first product, choose your store design, and then over in the corner, ask anything dot dot dot, so I do.
14:02Jeff Tweedy:I type in prints because that's what I want to sell, and I get all these great questions immediately. What's the image slash artwork? I can describe it, or I can just upload an image. A dream. Things like Shopify checkout make it easy for customers to pay you, and when they return, their details are already saved. One tap and they're done. With Shopify handling setup and checkout, you have time to focus on the stuff that actually matters. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash newyorker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Mint Mobile.
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15:58Amanda Petrusich:Simone Sanders Townsend and I have known each other for more than a decade,
16:02Jeff Tweedy:tussling over politics and policy when she worked in the White House and I reported on it. And now we're friends and colleagues. And on our podcast, Clock It!, we are positioning ourselves at the intersection of culture and politics. Clock It is where we talk about what we see and hear in the news, so you can start to clock it too.
16:21Amanda Petrusich:Clock It with Simone and Eugene. All episodes available now.
16:31Jeff Tweedy:I really love the album title. And you wrote a little in the album release notes about the word twilight, which I agree is a beautiful word and a sort of melancholic idea too. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that, you know, twilight override. What does that mean to you?
16:49Amanda Petrusich:Yeah, the idea of making peace with something ending, you know, overriding the dread of, you know, if we're like looking at the word override, what am I overriding? It's not just, I mean, twilight's beautiful. So you're not really needing to override that, but you need to override your fear of it. And, you know, also remind yourself that twilight, if you wake up and you don't know what time of day it is, it could be sunrise, you know. And, you know, I'm 58 years old. I would say that that could conceivably be thought of as a twilight. I love that I have something to share with my kids. I love that I have something to share with my kids' friends and bands I meet and younger bands.
17:36Amanda Petrusich:I love getting to be hopefully something to them that I wish some of the bands I really admired had been for me, you know. That's like kind of a guiding principle is like what didn't happen that I wish had happened when it opened up for somebody. I was like, well, one thing for sure it's really easy to do is go say hi. Right. A lot of people didn't, you know. And it was like – I understand. It was just, you know, you're busy. You have to make a conscious effort to do it.
18:08Jeff Tweedy:Your sons are both on this record, that idea of kind of passing a torch. I don't know, taking a minute to say like, hey, thanks for being here. This is sort of what I know about this weird work. Do you feel like being a parent sort of gave you that instinct or helped you hone that instinct of like, I'm going to show you maybe how this works and try to make it easier for you?
18:27Amanda Petrusich:I don't know. I feel like I would – I still probably turn my kids on to more bands than they turn me on to because I listen to a lot of music. Like everybody assumes, oh, your kids are like telling you about – and I'm like, no, it's pretty back and forth these days. And just maybe my comfort level around people their age is enhanced by my fatherhood. Yeah. But I think it's more really rooted in a sense of gratitude that I've been able to do this thing that I love and I get to do for so long. I think there's a part of me that wants to feel like I deserve it. And when you – hopefully modeling a behavior that is accessible to someone else and also presents an idea of a good strategy for living or coping, you know?
19:23Jeff Tweedy:Yeah. I mean that reminds me of the word override too because in a sense you're sort of trying to, you know, not right the wrongs of the past or the people who were, you know, maybe less friendly than they should have been to you.
19:32Amanda Petrusich:Yeah, override is a word that we use in – I mean, I'm sorry to get back that – but like we use in computer programming. Yeah, yeah, of course. Like we're probably more aware of that word from that world. Yeah, certainly. And so I wanted – it's like kind of appropriating it and turning it back on the technology itself or something. You know, like I want to override this. I have the ability to override this by singing a song.
19:59Jeff Tweedy:Yeah.
20:00Amanda Petrusich:Because I can't be scared when I'm singing.
20:03Jeff Tweedy:So that's true for you that you can't sing and be afraid at the same time?
20:07Amanda Petrusich:I think so. Yeah.
20:08Jeff Tweedy:That's amazing.
20:10Amanda Petrusich:I mean, have you ever tried it?
20:13Jeff Tweedy:You don't want to hear me sing, Jeff. But no, but I know what you mean, actually.
20:17Amanda Petrusich:Well, it's like a lot of people would say the same thing about laughing.
20:20Jeff Tweedy:Yeah.
20:20Amanda Petrusich:But I do think that's true because it grounds you in the present. It grounds you in the moment, you know. We borrow a lot of fear from our imaginations. Yeah. So overriding that and trying to use my imagination to, you know, again, reject that and hopefully make something that I can keep singing.
20:44Jeff Tweedy:Yes. We talked a little bit about – you spoke a little bit about aging. I mean, you're still pretty young, 58, but it seems like it's all over the album, sort of the idea of time and change and I don't know. You know, the question of like, well, do we lean into that or do we resist that? I mean, is aging something you've just started thinking about more recently?
21:06Amanda Petrusich:My wife has been through a lot of health issues for, I don't know, the past 16 years or so. It may be actually since I met her, like multiple cancer scares and treatments and things like that. So I associate that with aging even though that's not – she was pretty young when the first cancer was diagnosed and surgically removed. The biggest concern with paging to me is like obviously your body, having your body stay in service of your desires. Yeah. Just being more aware of our body's fallibility. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. If time is represented a lot on the record, which I think it is, in some ways I think I tried to organize the record as past, present, and future with the three discs.
22:04Amanda Petrusich:And, you know, it's certainly on my mind, but I kind of don't know anybody that isn't like kind of obsessed with time. Of course. Yeah. It's like pushes in on all of us.
22:17Jeff Tweedy:Yeah. And that idea of sort of hovering, you know, and I don't know, you look at the rest of your life and you think, all right, I've got a third act coming. You know, what do I want that to look like? That idea of imagining a future, which is an inherently sort of hopeful thing, right, to think about how you want to spend the rest of your time.
22:32Amanda Petrusich:Right. How different time feels post-pandemic.
22:36Jeff Tweedy:Yes. Or like that shock to the system seems to have really reset our relationship with time. Yeah. Yes, I agree. I feel like we don't talk about that enough. There is this sort of strange kind of foggy collective like denial.
22:55Amanda Petrusich:In my opinion, everybody is walking around traumatized. Yeah. Like, like without talking, yeah, literally without talking about it. But it's like, to me, it's just a matter of fact. And with varying degrees of severity. Yeah, yeah. The loneliness wasn't particularly bad for my family because we were all in one house during the pandemic. But, you know, there were people that had their entire worlds turned upside down for a long stretch without any real hope in sight for quite some time.
23:25Jeff Tweedy:Yeah. I mean, and that was another thing that I think also made us consider like the system, like our bodily systems, you know, and the sort of ways in which they can falter. One of my favorite songs starts out describing a prom night disaster. You're a kid in a tuxedo. You're throwing up on the side of the road. It's very awful, very hilarious. But then you sing the chorus, forever never ends. I'm always back there again and again and again. In what ways are you still living that experience?
23:52Amanda Petrusich:I mean, always. I just think that we always carry around those – don't you – I don't mean to turn questions back on the interviewer, but don't you have that where you realize that you're reacting to a certain situation and it's 100 percent informed by something that happened to you in the past?
24:13Jeff Tweedy:Of course.
24:14Amanda Petrusich:And that you don't even put it together in the moment, but that you realize, oh, I'm not actually upset with the person that I'm talking to. I'm upset with my math teacher. Right. Yes, yes, yes.
24:27Jeff Tweedy:This is the great pleasure, perhaps, or sort of revelatory nature of therapy. I think maybe you sort of get led back towards like maybe it's actually this thing.
24:37Amanda Petrusich:Right. But I think songwriting is a form of that in a way. Certainly if you have a process that is more oriented towards self-discovery, there's something liberating about naming it as like I experienced a moment of forever on the side of the road. A hissing road flare Baby's breath in her hair In the middle of nowhere In the middle of a nightmare I had to call my dad I knew he'd be mad I've never seen him not mad
25:27Amanda Petrusich:Vomit in the frozen grass Peppermint schnapps Well, here come the cops You know, where it was, it got really, really dark. And it's humorous in a way.
25:43Jeff Tweedy:Of course, yes.
25:44Amanda Petrusich:And as a kid, I probably just assumed that things were going to work out. Yeah. But that's, you know, as close to despairing as you can be. hopeless. Yeah.
26:11Jeff Tweedy:I remember PJ Harvey saying something to me about, you know, how much work the instrumentation does and the melody does in terms of sort of providing more context for a story and more meaning for a story. And when that disappears and all you have is language, it's a very different challenge.
26:27Amanda Petrusich:For sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Words on the page. That's why rock lyrics generally, even by the people that we revere as, you know, great poets, tend to not look like great poetry on the page. Yeah. Which is kind of interesting because some of the first things that we probably have to read were maybe written down with a melody in mind.
26:50Jeff Tweedy:Yeah. Yeah, of course. You know, I think.
26:52Amanda Petrusich:And it's because they are so helpful in memorizing something long, attaching it to a melody, attaching it to a meter made it so much easier to have a story be transmitted across time reliably.
27:09Jeff Tweedy:Yeah, yes. And that's a powerful, I mean, that's a powerful force too. You know, on this record for me, there's a really palpable thread of just keep going. You know, and maybe that's what you were talking about of sort of the structure of past, present, and future in the sense that life is long and hard and incredible and surprising. And, man, you just got to see what happens next. You know, don't stop. I'm curious if that feels true to you, that sort of subtext of the record, and if, yes, sort of how you got there, how you got to a place where you thought like just one foot in front of the other.
27:45Amanda Petrusich:I don't know if I got there. It's just like a surrender to it just being the facts, you know. I have panic disorder. And one of the things that comes with that is feeling like you're never going to be okay. And then you are. I've seen people facing circumstances much more harrowing than I'll have probably ever faced in my life with a lot more resolve and fearlessness. I've been fortunate enough to work with Mavis Staples a lot in my life and like several records and she lives in Chicago. And I always think about her history, the history of the movements she was a part of, her family history, and her joy.
28:36Jeff Tweedy:Yeah.
28:37Amanda Petrusich:It is not put on at all. And it is so rebellious to me. Defiant. Or it's like dance at them. Dance at the bastards. I have a lyric on the record. That's what we're here for. Yes, that's what we're here for. I want to dance right into the light. You know, and like instead of like seeing the light at the end of your life and thinking, oh, like I do want to be like, oh, yeah, here we go. Let's. I love that. I'm ready.
29:14Jeff Tweedy:That's almost a response to that Dylan Thomas line. Right. It's I think it's Dylan Thomas, the rage, rage against the dying of the light. Sure. Instead. Yeah. Dance right in.
29:23Amanda Petrusich:It's this way, guys.
29:25Jeff Tweedy:I love that.
29:26Amanda Petrusich:The conga line.
29:28Jeff Tweedy:It's going to limbo right on into the afterlife. Jeff I can't thank you enough For this conversation today and that music
29:35Amanda Petrusich:Oh thank you, thanks for having me
29:37Jeff Tweedy:Such a pleasure
29:38Amanda Petrusich:It's an honor to be here, thank you
29:42Amanda Petrusich:Scratching at the dead golden lawn A leaning doe and a shaking fawn I called for you Then they were gone A planet without moons A clock with no noons Too late, too soon Love is for love
30:17Amanda Petrusich:I'm counting on The spitting type To follow through All the night The kind of dark That shocks and bites When the light goes on strike I can't make it to the mic Love is love And like is like
30:52Amanda Petrusich:So let's celebrate For another year Hunt and kill Another hollow fear Ache for someone Already here Catching I don't care In the humming summer air Love is for love And I'm not going anywhere
31:31Amanda Petrusich:Jeff Tweedy's Twilight Override comes out this month. And you can read Amanda Petrosich on music at newyorker.com. And you can subscribe to The New Yorker in that very same place, newyorker.com. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show. See you next time.
31:58Jeff Tweedy:The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barge, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.
32:27Amanda Petrusich:We had additional help this week from Pran Bandy.
32:30Jeff Tweedy:The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.
32:41Jeff Tweedy:WNYC Studios is supported by the Community of Writers, presenting year-round online courses in the Writers' Annex. Coming up, Griffin Poetry Prize winning poet Brenda Hillman and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Haas present a five-week course on the poetry of WB Yeats every Tuesday in September. Financial aid is available. Registration and more at communityofwriters.org.
33:04Amanda Petrusich:Did you know that the New Yorker Radio Hour is on YouTube? Well, you can listen to the show on any podcast platform, and now you can also watch our biggest interviews on the New Yorker's YouTube page.
From the publisher
Jeff Tweedy is best known as the front man of Wilco, the rock band he formed in Chicago in 1994. In recent years, he’s been working more often as a solo artist, putting out records under his own name as well as a memoir and essays on songwriting. Amanda Petrusich sat down with the singer-songwriter to talk about “Twilight Override,” which comes out later this month. Recorded with Tweedy’s two sons and a number of his fellow Chicago-based musicians, “Twilight Override” is a triple album of songs centered on themes of time, aging, fear, and “making peace with something ending.” “If we're looking at the word override, what am I overriding?” Tweedy says. “I mean, twilight's beautiful . . . but you need to override your fear of it.”
Tweedy performs acoustic versions of “Love Is for Love,” “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” and “Forever Never Ends.”
