Photo by Shervin Lainez
Jeff Tweedy
Like many people, I feel like I never had the chance to fully heal from the pandemic—whatever that may mean. Five years on, I still find myself struggling to even describe what happened, and how such a global catastrophe impacted those closest to me. And I know I am not alone. It has become clear that Americans lack the vocabulary to describe the damage wrought by Covid. So, we end up not talking about it, trying to simply ignore the pain of recent history. He will perform on Wednesday, Nov. 5 at the Pabst Theater.
I found myself thinking of this loss for words while listening to Jeff Tweedy’s Twilight Override, the singer-songwriter’s latest release, an ambitious triple album made up of 30 tracks. “One Tiny Flower,” the project’s first track, takes the listener to a somber moment when “The grass is growing/All over town/From the cracks in the sidewalks/Where the shops shut down.” It is hard to hear Tweedy’s gentle voice sing these words and not wince at their directness. Yet the song’s chorus—“One tiny flower I’m jumping over”—suggests the continued existence of both life and beauty in the face of immeasurable loss.
Tweedy, though, is quick to point out that “I’m not a topical songwriter. I’m not a particularly strident political polemist.” For him, there is more value in “giving a clear example” of what something “felt like, or what it feels like, without prescriptions or remedy or anything like that.” And Twilight Override captures the feeling of the past half decade, providing an honest-yet-fractured take on our collective recent history. “I do think everybody is walking around traumatized in a way that’s very apparent,” continues Tweedy, “but nobody’s talking about it, and it doesn’t feel like it’s being addressed in any meaningful way where people could find any resolve. So no one is moving one.” In fact, Twilight Override features a song titled “No One’s Moving On,” which Tweedy admits is placed “kind of at the center of the record.”
Past, Present, Future
One of the most pernicious elements of the pandemic was the way it distorted understandings of time, a development that has come to warp understandings of history. Twilight Override adroitly documents how these processes have felt. “With three records you have a lot of trinities to draw upon,” notes Tweedy, “and the one I’ve written about most in my life and think about the most is time, so it was past, present, and future that loosely defined the disks.” Memory appears disjointed throughout Twilight Override, as visions from Tweedy’s youth (“This Is How It Ends”) co-mingle with thoughts on seeing the Stray Cats in Spain in 2019 (“Stray Cats in Sprain”). “None of the temporal distinctions between past, present, and future,” continues Tweedy, “are airtight; they leak into each other. The past changes and it’s almost as alterable as the future. In fact, it’s part of how you alter the future.”
All of this adds up to a heavy listen. But one is struck by the inversion of the album’s title track in the song’s chorus: “Twilight Override” shifts to “Override Twilight.” It is a subtle shift, but one that suggests we can get—and do—better. But to move forward, as Tweedy sings, “I’ll need to find a new past.” Twilight Override is the sound of that discovery process earnestly beginning.
