Into The Music
Jeff Tweedy has been doing this for nearly four decades, and somewhere along the way he stopped trying to be what people expected him to be and started being something harder to categorize and more interesting.
He came up in the early nineties as a founding member of Uncle Tupelo, the Belleville, Illinois band that spent a few records inventing what would become alt-country before falling apart in the way bands with two gifted and stubborn songwriters tend to fall apart. Tweedy took half the band and formed Wilco. Jay Farrar took the other half and formed Son Volt. Both made great records. Only one of them is still doing genuinely surprising work in 2026.
Tweedy performed “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” on Jimmy Kimmel Live this week, the latest stop on a promotional circuit for last year’s “Twilight Override,” his fifth solo record and arguably the best thing he has made outside of Wilco. The song is exactly what its title suggests: a meditation on what it meant to grow up with Lou Reed as a kind of accidental guardian, the way certain records arrive at exactly the right moment and raise you when nobody is watching.
What makes Tweedy compelling now, after all these years, is not just that he keeps making records. It is that he keeps making records that sound like they needed to be made. “Twilight Override” is a triple album, which is either the most self-indulgent or most generous thing a musician can do depending on how you feel about it. In Tweedy’s case it lands on the generous side. There is enough space in those songs to wander around in.
He is currently in the middle of a solo North American tour, finishing in Bozeman, Montana in April before heading out with Wilco for a summer run with Yo La Tengo and Hovvdy as support. The Wilco dates include Solid Sound, the band’s annual festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, where they headline alongside the Breeders, Gang of Four, and Billy Bragg this June. The lineup is a statement of values disguised as a festival booking.
The arc of Tweedy’s career resists easy summarizing. He is not a legend in the sense of someone who made one or two great things and has been coasting on them since. He is something more useful: a working songwriter who got more interesting as he got older, who processed a public substance abuse struggle and wrote about it with clear eyes, who made a solo record about grief and a triple album about time, and who showed up on Kimmel this week to play a song named after Lou Reed with his band, which includes his own sons.
That last detail is not incidental. Spencer and Sammy Tweedy both play with him on tour and on record. The generational transmission of music, the way it moves through families and neighborhoods and basements, is part of what he has always been writing about without always naming it directly. “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” names it directly.
He is one of those artists who rewards sustained attention. Start with “Being There” if you have not already. Follow it wherever it takes you. There is more than enough to keep going for a while.
