Jeff Tweedy has increasingly turned his songwriting gaze inward as he gets further away from the raucous, punky, alt-country years of Uncle Tupelo and more ensconced in the arty Americana of Wilco. Because of the inwardness, his newest solo album feels especially adaptable to our current isolation.
Yet while Love Is the King was laid down in April 2020, after a Wilco tour was indefinitely postponed for obvious reasons, it’s not really about the current isolation. Instead, and like many later Wilco releases, it’s about sense impressions, small moments extended toward the temporal horizon, and emotions struggling to be fully felt.
It is simpler than Wilco, with Tweedy enlisting only his sons, Spencer and Sammy, to accompany him with, respectively, drums and harmony for acoustic, electric and bass guitars, and for his familiarly folky voice, which hasn’t been duded up by years of Chicago living. Nor has Chicago kept him from stepping back into his cowboy boots, as he does on “Opaline,” which provides Bakersfield twang, albeit modified by a Tweedy guitar solo that can’t decide whether to shake the dust from honky-tonk rafters or crawl backstage for a nap.
Other solos range from the briskly Beatlesque reinforcement of the melody on “George Saunders—A Robin or a Wren” to the deliberately desultory squalling near the end of the opening, title track, and become a sub-theme of the songs. Tweedy’s lyrics establish another sub-theme of holding onto love until it is simply impossible not to let go: “Between you and me, I’m relieved they put you away,” he tells “Gwendolyn” over 1970s-inspired folk rock.
Otherwise, he’s trying to maintain a grip, longing for home just above the rollin’ blues of “Bad Day Lately,” rhapsodizing hoarsely about his wife within the subdued playing of “Even I Can See,” or pleading “You’re all I need” as “Half Asleep” lets Love Is the King drift to a close. Like the rest of us, he’s never so alone as he sounds.
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