co-presented by
JEFF TWEEDY
Arriving five years after 2020’s “surreal and acutely felt” (New York Times) pandemic-era reflection Love Is the King, Twilight Override is an intentional, sprawling three-disc album, a testament to creativity in the face of overwhelming darkness. Recorded and self-produced by Tweedy at his Chicago studio, The Lo, with engineering and mixing from Tom Schick, Twilight Override features Chicago-based friends and family: James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, Liam Kazar, and Tweedy’s children Spencer and Sammy.
The three chapters of Twilight Override stand alone, but together they tell a story of the past, present, and future.
When you choose to do creative things, you align yourself with something that other people call God. And when you align yourself with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction. You’re on the side of creation. And that does a lot to quell the impulse to destroy. Creativity eats darkness.
Sort of an endless buffet these days—a bottomless basket of rock bottom. Which is, I guess, why I’ve been making so much stuff lately. That sense of decline is hard to ignore, and it must be at least a part of the shroud I’m trying to unwrap. The twilight of an empire seems like a good enough jumping-off point when one is jumping into the abyss.
Twilight sure is a pretty word, though. And the world is full of happy people in former empires, so maybe that’s not the only source of this dissonance. Whatever it is out there (or in there) squeezing this ennui into my day, it’s fucking overwhelming. It’s difficult to ignore. Twilight Override is my effort to overwhelm it right back. Here are the songs and sounds and voices and guitars and words that are an effort to let go of some of the heaviness and up the wattage on my own light. My effort to engulf this encroaching nighttime (nightmare) of the soul.
— Jeff Tweedy
While Tweedy did not intentionally plan out a cohesive narrative for the album, the connections between the songs became apparent after a few listens. “I’m not trying to imply that I had this all mapped out as a story,” he explains. “The way that this ended up falling together and being arranged—it does tell a story that I think I wanted to tell. That’s what a process does for me. This is why it sounded right to me in this order, aside from tempos and music."