Tweedy & Son
Jeff Tweedy has spent nearly an hour justifying his need to make a solo album when the phone rings. As the call comes through, Tweedy is relaxing on a sofa at his boutique Downtown New York hotel. He’s partway through a busy summer press day in advance of the first studio release under his own name, Sukierae, and outfitted in dark pants and a black Western-style shirt that can only be described as the “classic Tweedy look.” The 47-year- old singer/guitarist mentions that the call may be his next interview, and his slender, 18-year-old son, and current drummer, Spencer— who is sitting across the coffee table from his dad in a far more formal wooden chair—moves across the room, as if by instinct, to pick up the phone.
“It’s Mom,” Spencer says, briefly shifting from interview mode to his slightly more natural talking-to-a-parent voice. The elder Tweedy gestures that he’ll call his wife back before returning to the topic at hand. He’s explaining his decision to finally release a solo album almost 20 years after forming Wilco from the ashes of his seminal alt-country band Uncle Tupelo, only to veer a little left of that concept to create a record with the help of his son. Tweedy also doesn’t have a problem pointing out the humor in the fact that he decided to try out a batch of new material in front of a large audience of devoted Wilco fans who had never heard his latest songs. Yet, they still felt the need to instantaneously post bootleg videos of Tweedy’s test drive on the Internet.
“It’s like, ‘Can you at least wait until we know how to play these songs?’” Spencer jokes, after sitting back down near his dad. Wearing a hipster-approved jeans-and-a-long-sleeve-shirt outfit that one can somehow trace stylistically back to Wilco, Spencer looks like a taller, slender and more innocent version of his dad.
“I really love the way Wilco works, but it’s a little bit like working with a committee,” Tweedy says nonchalantly. “It occurred to me, while we were making [2011’s] The Whole Love, that I’m the only one who hasn’t made a record without a committee.” He pauses for a second, shifts in his seat and smiles in amazement before continuing, “It’s kind of miraculous that six guys can hammer around an arrangement and reach a consensus. There’s a really great working communication.”
As Wilco’s lead singer, primary songwriter and driving creative force, in certain respects, Tweedy doesn’t need to make a traditional solo album. He’s also already flirted with some artistic freedom, thanks to the acoustic sets he’s regularly played since Uncle Tupelo dissolved and, as Spencer points out, he even released the DVD/CD solo live set Sunken Treasure. However, Tweedy is quick to mention that those concerts have always been stacked with material associated with his various bands.
“I’ve always benefited from people knowing the songs in a different context,” he says of the sporadic shows he’s played without Wilco. “I can play those tunes in weird, acoustic arrangements that wouldn’t feel like a normal, acoustic guitar sound and people fill in the gaps because they know where stuff goes.”
Tweedy’s decision to release Sukierae is the proof that Wilco’s current six-man incarnation has grown into a tried-and-true band since the group’s lineup solidified in 2004, after a few years of personnel turnover. When he first started toying with the idea for the album, Tweedy admits that he had a pre-conceived idea that when a band leader makes a “solo” record they should play all, or most of, the instruments themselves. But instead of making an acoustic album or piecemeal DIY recording, Sukierae turned into a genuine collaboration with another musician named Tweedy— Spencer, that is.
“There’s something truer about that—it’s different than Tom Petty making his own record and using half The Heartbreakers on it,” Tweedy jokes. “It was just my own little criteria, but I thought it would be a good loophole if I used my own DNA to play the drums.”
In many ways, Mavis Staples is ultimately responsible for Sukierae. Tweedy is a long-time advocate of the veteran gospel-and-soul singer and helped introduce Staples to a new generation of music fans when he produced her 2010 release, You Are Not Alone. The collaboration worked so well that when Staples returned to Wilco’s famed Windy City creative incubator The Loft to work on the follow-up, One True Vine, Tweedy played the majority of instruments on the album himself. One notable exception was Spencer, who came by after school to lay down drums on most of the album’s tracks. Their synergy was palpable and, when Tweedy decided to move ahead with his project during Wilco’s downtime last year, he brought Spencer on board. They dubbed the project “Tweedy,” partly as a nod to Staples, who usually refers to Jeff by his surname.
“It all really rolled right off the end of the Mavis project, and I was about to graduate from high school so it’s a little bit of good timing. Would you say that’s not far off, Dad?” says Spencer, who speaks with both the earnestness of a rising musician and the thoughtfulness of a passionate music fan who has been fascinated by rock journalism and record-collecting from a young age. “When it was clear you wanted a more full arrangement for the Mavis record, you tried to experiment and see if it would work with me playing on it.”
Despite his relatively traditional upbringing, Spencer is some- thing of a modern-day Renaissance man and artistic prodigy. He’s a gifted writer whose relatable-but-thoughtful stories about school, summer camp and the woes of having your blog’s URL hijacked turned him into a cult-hero blogger by the time of his Bar Mitzvah. Growing up in the shadows of fame, Spencer has channeled his observational skills into a budding photography career, and he’s part of a close-knit community of teen tastemakers that includes Tavi Gevinson (who created Rookie magazine and is already a force in the fashion world).
Of course, he’s also a skilled drummer who’s practiced for almost as long as Wilco’s been a band. Tweedy mailed his son his first drum kit during a tour stop in Seattle when he was only two. Spencer received guidance from longtime Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche; he played his first live gig at the tender age of seven; and his band The Blisters have appeared at Lollapalooza, where his dad channeled his latent soccer-coach enthusiasm into a side gig as his roadie.
Though Tweedy brought his family on the road from time to time—and Spencer even sat in with Wilco when they opened for Neil Young at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 2008—he also worked hard to give his children a relatively traditional home life. He admits, “My wife Sue and I always tried to err on the side of our children having normal lives—having structure and having friends.”
Tweedy clearly sees potential in his son’s music—and lovingly mentions that he has trouble keeping up with Spencer in the studio—but their father-son boundaries remain intact. When Spencer mentions that he missed some school to work on Sukierae, his dad gently interjects, “Not really—maybe a day or two.” Later, Tweedy off-handedly boasts that Spencer earned an academic scholarship. He emphasizes, “They’ve been on the road, but [my children] haven’t lived on the road,” before his son jumps in to add that he’s been on tour, “just enough to feel comfortable with it.”
“I’ve always felt a little sorry for those kids whose parents are real gypsies,” Tweedy says. “They raised their whole families on the road with a tutor on the tour bus. I think it’s fairer to a kid to have their own structure and routine and get to have a little bit of a normal life.”
“And have a community—like Chicago,” Spencer quips.
“I guess some of those kids end up being really interesting because they’re able to make friends so quickly,” Tweedy says, before turning to his son and rhetorically asking, “But you guys seem to make friends pretty quickly, too?”
Tweedy has never really hid his sons from the press, either. Both Spencer and his younger brother Sam appear in the 2002 Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and, especially after critics slapped Wilco with the “dad-rock” tag around 2009’s Wilco (The Album), interviewing Tweedy in the presence of his family became a popular shtick. But Sukierae marks the first time that Tweedy and Spencer went into the studio to create something that will be contextualized within the Wilco orbit. Shortly after finishing One True Vine in 2013, the Tweedys started hashing out ideas in The Loft and came up with 90 rough sketches, which they honed down to 40 tracks and, finally, Sukierae‘s 20 fully realized songs. They worked around Wilco tours, Spencer’s school obligations and other media commitments. (Tweedy has appeared on both Parks and Recreation and Portlandia during the past year.) Over time, they also recruited some extra hands, including the sweet-voiced Lucius singers Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, and Tweedy pal Scott McCaughey, who is best known for his work with The Minus 5 and R.E.M.
Spencer notes that Wilco’s engineers served as an important council to bounce ideas off of. A thread connecting all of Sukierae‘s songs is that they work well in a two-person format, instead of Wilco’s full-band arrangements. The resulting album is neither stripped-down nor as layered as a traditional Wilco record. The descending chords on “I’ll Sing It” have a ‘90s alt-rock vibe while the sparse “Wait For Love” has both an unexpected whistling section and a breezy, Big Star ethos. “Diamond Light Pt. 1” rests on Spencer’s drum march but still contains the psychedelic tweaks and melodic guitar changes that modern Wilco often use as a calling card. There are some spastic freak-outs, especially “New Moon.”
“I don’t really ever finish songs until I’m in the studio, so I think any of these songs could have potentially been a Wilco song,” Tweedy points out. “It might have been in a different key or headed in a different direction, arrangement-wise—maybe it would have been stretched out for a guitar solo. In this case, I just tried to fulfill the song idea’s potential. If Wilco was around, I would play the guys a bunch of the ideas and the one that got the most people excited, we would dig into that. There is a committee with Wilco, but I’m still the chairman of the board so I have to kind of weigh in on everybody’s part. I try not to be dictatorial—I try and just get people comfortable with contributing the thing they are most excited about.”
Though it was never part of his original plan, Tweedy mastered Sukierae this past March while Spencer was in the middle of his final high school semester. “Some things in life just have to hit you over the head like, ‘We won’t have another chance to go out and take a lap around the world and play some music together for another four years after he goes to college,’” Tweedy says. They also decided to bridge the generation gap by putting together an all-ages Tweedy live band that includes guitarist Jim Elkington and bassist Darin Gray along with keyboardist Liam Cunningham, who went to elementary school with Spencer. (He also lived with the Tweedy family for a bit while his parents, who work for the Obama administration, were traveling.)
Musically, Spencer says he had an immediate and natural connection with his dad, in part, because they share the same stylistic reference points. “We see eye to eye, musically,” he says. “I can’t think of a single record that we disagree about, and that’s mostly due to the fact that my dad has a really open mind and isn’t super judgmental about new music. But another reason is I really love listening to classic albums and there is still a whole world of stuff that I haven’t discovered. I’m trying to get up on my music literacy and those are all records that my dad knows and loves and maybe even listened to around the same age. I’ve also never had a really drastic musical-taste phase where I’ve gotten too far off the boat and loved something like Eminem.”
Tweedy smiles and leans toward his son, almost as if Spencer has hit one into the outfield. “One of the great things about having kids is getting to hear things with them,” Tweedy says earnestly. “I have a lot easier time feeling like I’m having an intimate moment with somebody being quiet in a room, listening to a record. Getting to share music that meant a lot to me my whole life with two sets of fresh ears, with Spencer and his brother every morning on our way to school, is like getting to hear everything again. Fun is a cheap word but that’s what this is. It’s fulfilling.”
Spencer adds, “Pretty much my whole life, we’ve been listening to records together in the car or at home. Some adults plateau at a certain age and say, ‘I’ve heard enough music,’ but my dad’s never stopped exploring.” He’s acutely aware that though he has adventurous tastes and probably can talk circles around even his most knowledgeable indie-rock friends, his dad has inspired an entire generation of music listeners with equally deep tastes and still keeps up with current underground-rock trends. (He cites the The Orwells and Twin Peaks as bands that he managed to introduce his dad to and humbly says, “I like the quote: ‘Just because everything’s already been said doesn’t mean everybody has said it.’”)
Tweedy says there was a point when he got past the rock-history primer with his sons and started introducing them to new music. “It’s just the way our family has learned to communicate,” he muses. “Maybe if we were a different family, we would be playing catch or something.” He says that his younger son Sam probably has the “best musical taste in the house.” In fact, Sam has been asking his dad about obscure Brian Eno songs. “He’s deep into stuff, deep into T. Rex—deep into Tyrannosaurus Rex.”
Spencer, who comes off as someone twice his age, says, “Sam isn’t as into playing music, and I think there is probably a certain amount of inhibition about it being his thing because it is my thing. Being the younger child, you weigh yourself against your older brother.”
His dad jumps in: “He’s a great singer. He’s just one of those guys that maybe never will sing comfortably in front of people.”
After taking a year off, Spencer plans to attend Lawrence University in Wisconsin. Though he is looking for a general liberal- arts education, he chose the school, in part, because he’ll have access to the students attending Lawrence’s world-renowned con- servatory program. The ability to select great musicians is a trait he shares with his dad.
“I always take a little bit of pride in being able to surround myself with musicians that are better than me,” Tweedy says. “Thriving in a challenging environment has allowed me to grow myself. That’s all I want him to have, not just with this but in whatever music he gets to play with other people in college—people that are going to make you grow and adapt.”
Tweedy’s hotel room is situated a few blocks east of the Hudson River. As he stares out the window and notices the remains of a rotting pier, he jokes in his trademark between-song-banter deadpan voice, “I had to check to make sure those weren’t dead bodies when I checked in.” His eyes move a few miles north toward Hoboken, N.J., where Wilco played with Bob Dylan and My Morning Jacket last summer on the AmericanaramA tour. Bob Weir was part of the tour’s first leg and, though he wasn’t at the Jersey show, Tweedy says that his loose spirit stayed with the band for the rest of the run.
“I don’t think Wilco is a jamband and I don’t know if I really relate to many jam- bands, but I’m 100 percent on board with the way jamband audiences and jambands interact,” Tweedy says with a smile. “And I think that Wilco does have some of that. I want to be related to, and I want to communicate with an audience and convey emotion. That doesn’t require anything except being present and allowing yourself to even sound bad.”
Tweedy pivots back to his son and the conversation shifts to his upcoming tour. He admits that live stamina is something you learn from years of touring but says, “I hope the confidence that I have getting onstage, at this point in my life, helps a little bit. If one show was going to ruin your chances of playing music, it would have happened to me a long time ago.”
Through his struggles, Tweedy says that he has learned to accept that his songs tend to be somber and to occasionally have fun with his serious material. Spencer adds, “When the news about the album first came out, I saw something online that was like, ‘I wonder if this will be strum, strum, boo-hoo, strum or boo-hoo, strum, strum.’”
“It’s both. It’s a double record,” Tweedy says with a hearty dad-joke laugh.
Spencer sees the acceptance of sad songs in popular music as something of a broader trend in current indie culture. His dad tries to join in the conversation but quips, “I’m sorry, I can only see things in terms of my career.”
In the future, Tweedy would still like to make a classic, stripped-down, acoustic- based solo record, though Wilco remains his primary mouthpiece. For now, he’s enjoying both his family time and recording the music he hears in his head—even if that music sounds pretty close to Wilco.
“I know that I’m going to hate everything I do at some point, and I know that I’m going to come back around and hopefully love it again,” Tweedy says. “Ideally, I want to make music that I’m really excited to drive around and listen to in my car for a week or two. The hardest part is getting to the finish line and that’s when you start to hate it. And then, you finish it and you go, ‘How did I do that?’”
