Wilco songwriter and bandleader Jeff Tweedy has just about as extensive of a career outside of his main gig as he does in the band. Aside from his pre-Wilco band Uncle Tupelo, he’s popped up in side-projects Loose Fur and Golden Smog, started a band with his son called Tweedy, produced for the likes of Mavis Staples, and even offered up his debut solo album last year, Together At Last. That album featured re-recorded versions of songs from across his career, but the Chicago-based artist now has a new solo endeavor that will feature new music for the first time ever released under his own name.
Warm may be Jeff Tweedy’s first solo album of new material ever, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a major departure from what fans know and love. For one, collaborators like his son Spencer Tweedy and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche appear on the 11-song album. Plus, there’s the album’s first single, “Some Birds,” which is as feathery and breezy as the song title suggests, finding the singer comfortably sounding himself on the track he describes as “being a confrontation between self and shadow self simultaneously feeling I’m to blame and not to blame, present and gone, and utterly confused, but determined to hold someone accountable.”
Check out the video for “Some Birds” above, and look for Warm out on November 30 via Tweedy’s own dBpm Records. The liner notes for the album are written by Man Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders and are available to read in full on The New Yorker. Check out an exerpt below.
“Certain lyrical flowers sprout up with regularity across the ten song-yards that are this record.
A son who has lost a father sings to his wife, his sons, that father. There are apologies,
and mirror-twins; threats to enemies (‘I’d love to take you down / and leave you there’) and entreaties
(‘Let’s go rain again!’) and dreamy challenges (‘I wonder how much freedom we can dream’) and ornery morphings of language that serve a simple function: they make the listener love language again.”
