Reflections On Mortality And Family Connections

As it turned out Tweedy — the project originally envisaged as Tweedy elder's long-awaited debut solo foray — did indeed partake in a lot of touring once the double-LP dropped in September 2014. But they hadn't made Australasia or Japan before the deadline ran out, which is why they're now scheduling the trip to coincide with Spencer's spring break.

"Spencer kept coming by after school to see how it was going and I eventually asked him to sit in and play drums on some stuff."

"Initially I was playing around with doing that for the Mavis Staples record — the last one I did with her, One True Vine (2013) — and that was the idea then, to do a pretty stripped-down record and I was going to do everything," Jeff Tweedy recalls. "Eventually I just felt that it needed drums and Spencer kept coming by after school to see how it was going and I eventually asked him to sit in and play drums on some stuff. We ended up finishing the whole record together, and when we were done with that we were having such a good time that we just started tracking all the material I was putting together. I didn't know what it was for, whether it was a Wilco album or demos for a solo album or whatever: it just kind of grew out of this experiment to see if I could do everything, but I'm a terrible drummer so I felt lucky that I'd grown one."

Tweedy (the band) is a massive departure from Wilco's often massive soundscapes, but the singer finds it easy to flit between the two worlds. "It's very musical in both worlds to me," he offers. "Obviously Wilco has a much bigger sound and is a much bigger band playing bigger places, and we've gotten more muscular to perform in bigger spaces over the years but I think we're still able to do it in a musical way. And then it's very comfortable and relaxing actually being to be able to perform in a more intimate environment and still be in touch with a smaller-scale version of those dynamics. To me that's ideal, and I like it when Wilco can play in those environments too, but for Tweedy it's great because there's a lot of nuance to what the band is trying to do and it's great to have the opportunity to do it."

The lyrics for Sukierae reflect a difficult time for the Tweedy clan, making it even more of a family matter. "Most of the music and even the sequence of material is in place before I really start finalising the lyrics," Tweedy reflects. "For Sukierae there was a lot going on internally with our family — my wife was going through the early stages of battling cancer, which she's come out the other side of very well — so there was a lot of reflection on mortality and the connections in our family, and I think that shaped how a lot of the landscape of that record came together lyrically."