Wilco singer has new handle on life, from migraines to music

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This article was published 27/12/2019 (2454 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over the past 13 months, Jeff Tweedy put out two solo albums, a funny and poignant 293-page memoir called Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) and the new Wilco release called Ode to Joy. But the Chicago singer-songwriter has even bigger news to report: his migraines have improved.

He has written extensively about how the debilitating headaches consume him, lead to vomiting offstage during concerts and helped create a longtime addiction to Vicodin and other painkillers, as well as anti-anxiety meds.

“Overall, I get them way less than I did,” Tweedy says. “I’ve been able to take some medicine that seems to be a pretty healthy prophylactic. In general, they’re fairly under control. I did have one over the weekend, but the most welcome change is that I’m able to keep them from being completely full-blown, puking, losing two or three days.”

By phone, Tweedy is mostly businesslike but shifts to empathy mode upon learning his interviewer suffers from migraines, too: “That’s a drag. They’re no walk in the park.” The discussion turns to 2004’s brilliantly jagged A Ghost Is Born, which, at its noisiest, approximates what the headaches feel like.

Tweedy is informed those parts can be difficult for migraine-inclined listeners. He laughs. “Sorry about that!” he says. “One of the things art has provided for me is a way to not let pain go to waste — trying to turn that into some sort of inspiration, or something beautiful. But yeah, it can be still kind of painful to listen to.”

Ode to Joy continues Tweedy’s new philosophy, as he writes in his memoir, of “thinking about what exactly I would like to say directly to someone.” His solo albums, 2018’s Warm and this year’s followup, Warmer, are more autobiographical than Wilco releases: On Don’t Forget, he reminds someone he loves to “brush your teeth or you’ll have a funny smile,” then adds, tenderly, “You don’t have to smile at me.” This philosophy, he says, “carried over quite a bit” on Ode to Joy, which contains broader lines like “I try, in my way, to love everyone.”

“There’s definitely still more of an autobiographical lyrical stance on the solo records,” he says. “In Wilco, there’s a little bit more freedom to be a narrator, a different character, not necessarily myself.”

Making Ode to Joy began when Tweedy took drummer Glenn Kotche into the Loft, the band’s longtime Chicago studio. (Tweedy has worked there every day for the past four or five years.) They worked especially hard on individual drum “hits,” as Tweedy calls them, which give the record a sort of minimalist power. “The concept was ‘how much beauty can you put into one drum sound?’” he says. “There can be a lot of richness to simple sounds.”

Born in Belleville, Ill., Tweedy took up guitar at age 12 after he and his best friend were racing bikes “down a steep hill in front of his parents’ house on a dead-end street,” as he writes in the memoir. He wiped out, landed in a drainage ditch and bloodied his upper thigh so badly the ER made his parents sit down before viewing the wound. While he was recovering, his parents bought him an electric guitar for Christmas.

In English class at Belleville West High School, he was assigned to interview a classmate, then read the notes aloud and learned Jay Farrar liked the Sex Pistols.

The connection begat Uncle Tupelo in 1987, which Tweedy calls, in his book, “a band that plays a punk-country hybrid that a smattering of critics and punk-country-hybrid loyalists will blow way out of proportion.” It lasted six years, laying the foundation for the alt-country genre with songs like No Depression and We’ve Been Had.

After the band broke up, Farrar formed Son Volt and Tweedy turned to Wilco, which expanded into an experimental and multifaceted unit, turning out sprawling classics like 1996’s Being There and 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

In addition to becoming a sort of symbol for uncompromising guitar rock — over the years, he has criticized and accepted the term “dad rock” — Tweedy, 52, is a low-key local celebrity. Since moving to Chicago in the early ’90s, he has a “public life that is less than normal compared to my neighbours, I would suppose, but for the most part, I’m able to blend in and enjoy a pretty anonymous type of existence,” he says. But living in a big city has its drawbacks — late last month, police reported Tweedy and his wife, Susan Miller Tweedy, heard gunfire and found damaged doors in their home. Tweedy won’t say much about the incident, other than it’s been “sensationalized and turned into clickbait and I find it really, really upsetting.”

He seems relieved when the subject turns to trains — like the album of train sounds he listened to as a kid, partly inspired by his father, who spent much of his life at a railway company.

“I think about the first few records I listened to and it doesn’t seem too far off from what Wilco is today — the Monkees and steam locomotives,” he says.

“Those records became places to me that you could only visit if you listen to the record, if you close your eyes and imagine it.”

Wilco plays the Centennial Concert Hall on March 11. Tickets are $78.75 and are available at centennialconcerthall.com or at 204-949-3999.

— Chicago Tribune