Jeff Tweedy Is Built to Last

We live in an age of evanescence.

Seemingly as quickly as something can be created and released — whether it is an album, a movie, a play, a novel — it is consumed, dissected, and, often, forgotten.

The ceaseless maw of our collective attention requires constant feeding. To the detriment of both the artists and the artwork, that unforgiving pace tends to prize quantity over quality.

Given this reality, Jeff Tweedy’s latest solo work — a 30-song triple album titled Twilight Override — feels like a casual act of defiance. It commands your attention, but does so on the enduring strength of Tweedy’s observant, finely wrought lyrics, and his well-honed facility with melody and tempo.

To really absorb its nuances and, frankly, renew your appreciation for the 58-year-old singer-songwriter’s hiding-in-plain-sight genius, Twilight Override demands — and rewards — something many music fans forsake: patience.

“Persistence is an act of defiance, but [there’s] this sort of persistent idea that you should share a lot, and you should give a lot, and care a lot, and love a lot, and all of those things that I want people to do more of,” Tweedy said during a recent conversation with the Observer. “I tried to find more of it in myself and make a record out of it.”

The result of Tweedy’s expansive internal excavation is a multi-textured odyssey of moods, swinging from the insistent, jangling “Caught Up in the Past” to the gentle psychedelia of “Blank Baby” to the brittle, art-damaged “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter.”

Indeed, Twilight Override can feel less like finding than filtering. The Wilco frontman often seems to be unconsciously synthesizing the last three decades of his output through the lens of a now-veteran artist.

“There was a working idea of it being a triple record for a long time,” Tweedy said. “I don’t think it started being anything until we started thinking of it as a triple record. It’s just material I was recording, and then the triple record kind of became a guiding idea of what it was, what it could be.”

Each disc, produced by Tweedy alongside Tom Schick in Tweedy’s Chicago studio The Loft, is roughly grouped by a temporal theme (past, present and future) and showcases the breezy, expansive chemistry he shares with his bandmates.

The alchemy among his collaborators is unsurprising, as he is related to a couple of them: Tweedy’s sons Spencer and Sammy perform throughout Override, alongside James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart and Liam Kazar.

Tweedy is touring behind Twilight Override, and will return to Dallas for his first solo performance here in six years at the Longhorn Ballroom on Nov. 11. It’s one of our most anticipated concerts for fall.

The breadth of the new record, to say nothing of Tweedy’s voluminous back catalog apart from it, raises the question: Whither musical epics?

In a period when there are numerous films of expansive length (for instance, one of the year’s most acclaimed, One Battle After Another, clocks in at nearly three hours) and eagerly anticipated books of considerable density (Ron Chernow’s recently released biography of Mark Twain weighs in at 1,196 pages), why is music retreating from taking up space?

“I don’t know about other artists — I don’t really know what their aspirations are,” Tweedy said. “I just know I have a certain context that’s based on being around for a long time. I think different ambitions — becoming a parent and different challenges enter into how I think about what I want to do next.”

“I’m sure there are artists that are out there making really long pieces of art. It’s weird in the music business because the records have been dictated by technology for so long, and that’s been kind of accepted. There’s a real conformity to it — again, it’s physically impossible to put more music on a vinyl record than what we kind of expect.”

“But I like books a lot, and I don’t think books are very uniform in their shape … you luxuriate in this world for as long as you have this book on your shelf or in your imagination. … I think that a longer record allows a similar kind of thing to happen.”

Having the awareness (and the wherewithal) to pursue ambition wherever it may lead is another ingredient in seemingly scarce supply these days.

When a cursory scan of the charts or social media feeds reveals the broader music industry is content to chase whatever the algorithm craves, it can feel Sisyphean to contemplate breaking the pattern in hopes of connecting with an audience.

Yet Tweedy is undeterred, a self-described product of an era when the inherent risk of being an artist and striving to communicate with listeners was the hook.

“I like the idea that one of the things I think is very fortunate for me in my life is my record collection gave me permission to be who I am and do what I want to do, because I fell in love with artists that probably would have been rejected by a major label system,” Tweedy said. “Actually, some of the records sort of stuck around and came to me after a long period of time, like Velvet Underground records. … They reached me in a way that gave me permission to not sound like somebody else.

“I just think it’s silly that people use it as an excuse that ‘I’m not good at guitar,’ or ‘I’m not a great singer, so I’m not going to do that,’ or ‘I can’t write great poetry, so I shouldn’t do that.’ People fucking throw Frisbees all the time and they suck at it. Everybody that’s in your record collection dared to suck a lot more often than be good.”

Which returns us to the notion of evanescence. Music is inherently fleeting in a literal sense — you hear it, and it’s over.

Jeff Tweedy, for his part, envisions the initial contact between artist and audience not as the culmination of something, but rather a beginning. The way he sees it, the act of hearing, whether it be the songs on Twilight Override or anything else, creates the foundation of something tangible to the listener, something lasting.

“In my mind, you’re putting it together in your consciousness, and you’re interpreting it and contributing your own meaning to it,” he said. “Two people may have the same song inside their head … they can listen to my song and it’s going to be their song by the time they’ve absorbed it into their soul or heart or whatever — if it penetrates at all, it becomes theirs.”

“That’s why it feels very vulnerable to play a record for somebody and say, ‘This is how I feel.’ It’s because that is how you feel, and that is something you take ownership of.”

Jeff Tweedy with special guest Sima Cunningham will perform on Tuesday, Nov. 11, at 7:30 p.m. at Longhorn Ballroom, 216 Corinth St. Tickets are available starting at $44.64 on Prekindle.