Jeff Tweedy “WARM”
Well, he did it. It’s not a perfect record. Far from it. It’s not his best music. No. But I suspect Jeff Tweedy will never get closer to something as honest, as definitive and as unflinchingly empathetic as he does on “WARM.” This is monumental, middle-aged, dude stuff. This is the sort of music that, while universal in the generic sense, really reaches into the chest cavity of a certain middle-aged man and holds the heart up to behold -- naked, vulnerable, relieved, scared. “WARM” is what the other side of decades of therapy sounds like. It’s a search for meaning through empathy and self-acceptance in the second half. It’s music trying to fill the thin, but infinite, line between meaninglessness and purpose, loneliness and love, rageful fear and warm acceptance.
If “WARM” were presented to me as the Old Testament for some sort of cultish Men’s Group, I’m pretty sure I’d sign up.
In many ways, this is the logical culmination of a career of work. Somewhere in the melody, desperation and resignation of his voice and in the “going for it all” and “fuck it all” breadth of his Alternative Country music, Jeff Tweedy was searching for answers. For his devotees, his songs have always elicited the full spectrum from sniffles to sobbing. He knows how to hit the nerves. But, for the better part of a decade, beginning after “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” the bareness of sentiment was obscured by icy, if beautiful, protective layers applied by Jim O’Rourke and Nels Cline. While I love both musicians’ playing and some of the albums after “Y.H.F.”, but before Tweedy got sober, I also felt like some of the feeling was either detached from or obscured by the music and production.
But in recent years, we knew that the cold, hermetic seal of Wilco was thawing. You could hear it in the sound of their music. But you could see it more evidently in Tweedy himself. You could see it in his comedic turns on “Portlandia” and with his buddy, Nick Offerman. You could hear it in the humanity of records he produced for Mavis Staples and Joan Shelley. You could really sense it in his father / son music with Tweedy (the band). That being said, these were merely clues that required intuition. They were not fully formed revelations. In recent years, though, Tweedy converted to Judaism, an act of love and solidarity with his wife and sons that ushered him into a journey and culture of searching and introspection. Not long after, Tweedy’s father died, holding his son’s hand as he passed away. And then, in 2018, Tweedy published his mid-life autobiography, “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).” It was there, and on “WARM,” loosely a companion album to the book, that the floodgates really opened.
“WARM” is the album that Jeff Tweedy could only have made at age fifty, in confrontation with death, a subject he’d been staring at for decades, and life, a force he poetically clings to. With his sons now independent, but also able and inclined to collaborate with their Dad, Jeff Tweedy found himself unable to hide his love (and fear) away. On “WARM” he doesn’t aim for the masterpiece. He seems content to allow “Being There” and “Y.H.F.” to stand atop that mantle. Instead, he aims for radical empathy. At once a love letter to himself, his father, his wife and his children, “WARM” is not a definitive statement. It’s the statement in process. It’s not the beloved, reluctant, middle-aged Rock Star milking a musical trick of sentiment beneath fine art. It’s the music of a human heart pressing up against the flabbier, hairier, occasionally less attractive, but altogether more beautiful, skin of a brave and sensitive man.
“WARM” is played almost entirely by Jeff Tweedy and his son, Spencer. Tweedy’s other son, Sammy, joins for a song, as does Wilco drummer, Glenn Kotche. It is quite literally a “folksy” record in that it is stripped down and made among family. Adorned with lap steel (or a guitar pedal that approximates it), bass, synthesizer and drums, the album sounds modest in scale but expert in song craft. While there are solos, the jams are scant. If “WARM” is showy in any ways, it is in its honesty and its search for connection. There are specific songs on the record that naturally evoke the softer, post-Tweedy-detox version of Wilco. And some of those songs might have even been better served by a full band. But, to have done so would have robbed the mid-life meditation and family affair of its poignancy. These songs were meant to be played by Jeff Tweedy and his son(s) as the singer looked deeply inward to consider those things outside of him that he most cherished but could not control.
Though it hardly bears repeating, Tweedy is one of the very best songwriters of the last thirty years. His superpower is somewhere in his ability to deliver sadly beautiful songs that sound both like anthems for heaven and verses for believers who are losing faith. He’s fluent in all the important languages -- Country, Rock, Punk, Experimental -- and can bend a Major verse into a Minor chord like very few can. He’s not a traditionally “great” singer, but he’s able to channel both Neil Young and Paul Westerberg into hushed tones that also sound tuneful. It’s quite a feat. On “WARM,” all of these skills are on display, both in the sense that he writes and performs great songs and in that he does not hide himself or the songs inside the wizardry of his bandmates playing or production.
“Bombs Above,” the two minute opener, is a goddam master class in album thesis statements. On top of a slight bass line, some acoustic guitar and maybe some lap steel, the singer sounds like he’s not yet had his morning coffee. It’s early. He’s weary. And yet, he has to share an apology for all of the pain. It’s a most honest sentiment from a man who thinks of his pain as all pain but also knows this to be both true and deluded and selfish and honest as the day. So he says it. To everyone he loves. And, as soon as he’s done, the song ends.
Countless middle-aged songwriters before Tweedy have stared down Death, Loneliness, Love and rest of the existential canon. Some have done it more poetically (Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen). Some have done it more musically (Bob Dylan, Nick Drake) . But I cannot think of any man who has done it more honestly than Tweedy on “WARM.” Of the “death songs” on the record, “Don’t Forget” and “How Will I Find You” are the standouts. The former is a song simultaneously to his father and to his sons about wanting them to know how much they matter, how much he wants to matter and how much he fears none of it matters. The latter is the album’s closer and asks the two questions that would challenge most any believer: (1) How do we ever find somebody to love us in the way we want to love and be loved? (2) And then, more devastatingly, how will we reconvene with that love once we have passed away? On an album of mostly three minute, sad, but hopeful, songs, this final meditation is six minutes of the slightest instrumentation, punctured by longer stretches of feedback and exploration. It functions as a cliffhanger of sorts, forcing us to ask ourselves: “Is he OK? Did he make it through like we thought he did?”
In the middle, Tweedy confronts the anger within him that he knows, at its root, is really just fear. “Some Birds” is a gentle and modest, but flawless, pop song tapping this vein. And, towards the album’s end, he offers up “The Red Brick” and “Warm (When the Sun has Died),” a complex single idea, written in two parts about how an object of seething anger (the red brick) eventually warms, solidifies and, over time, becomes a shelter. Though far from the best songs on the record, they best express the Fear / Anger cycle that he is learning to disabuse himself of.
And then there is “I Know What It’s Like,” a song so on brand for empath-Tweedy as to function like a Brené Brown podcast, condensed into four minutes of music. The singer repeats the titular refrain. He knows what it like to feel alone. To self-medicate so as to not feel alone. To have to start again. He really does. But of course, he also knows that nobody really knows what others feel. But he wants to say it and he wants to occupy that space. Because even if he can’t really be there he can still try. The song is both literal in its framing of empathy and also quite metaphorical in the searching the singer goes through to genuinely connect without making it all about him.
Over the eleven songs on “WARM,” I was frequently reminded of something the late Jason Molina wrote and sang with Songs: Ohia on “Farewell Transmission” from “Magnolia Electric Company.” The singer, prone to existential melancholy, was never one to look away from the abyss. In one of his greatest, most brutally honest couplets, he sings:
The real truth about it is / No one gets it right
The real truth about it is / We’re all supposed to try
Though immensely talented and very much inspired by Jeff Tweedy, Jason Molina was not Tweedy’s equal as an artist or empath. Several years later after writing “Farewell Transmission,’” Molina died, before the age of forty, from alcoholism. On “WARM,” Jeff Tweedy plugs into Molina’s farewell transmission. He feels what Molina feels. He feels all the feelings. He cycles through them. And then, still standing, he wants to feel alongside his family and loved ones as well. Because that is his search. And that’s the very best he can do.