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Jeff Tweedy
Support: Buck Meek
Wednesday, Feb 27, 2019 7:30 PM
$20 Student (LIMITED) - $42.50 - Reserved Seating + Fees
SOLD OUT
Jeff Tweedy has been one of the most influential American musicians of the past few decades. The singer-songwriter has kept himself busy over the last 24 years, recording 10 albums with Wilco (as well as several collaborations) and one with Tweedy, the band he started with his son Spencer. WARM, Tweedy’s first solo album, is largely a self-sustained labor of love for Tweedy-due out Nov. 30 through dBpm, the record label Tweedy and Wilco started in 2011, it was recorded at Tweedy’s legendary Chicago studio, The Loft, with his son Spencer Tweedy, Glenn Kotche, and Tom Schick.
Zone 1 Reserved Seating - $42.50
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Ticket Availability
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SOLD OUT
Support: Buck Meek
A PERSON GETS TO A
CERTAIN STAGE IN LIFE — I’m there myself — no longer in the throes of
child-raising (that magnificent distraction), when he starts to think of death
not as some abstraction that happens to other people but as a big, indifferent
train that, even at this moment, is rolling out of a station located at an
unknown, but not infinite, distance away. “Isn’t it time, now, to finally be
happy?” the universe starts asking, along with a second, complicating question:
“But how can I be happy in a world like this?” Put another way: we seem born to
love, and yet everything here is conditional (i.e., comes to an end). How
should we live when the huge piano labeled “Death” is eventually going to fall,
not only on us, but on everyone we love?
This album is, it seems to me, an answer. Or, more than an answer, it’s a nod
to the validity of the question.
Should I be wary of life or enjoy it? the listener asks.
Yes, Jeff Tweedy says.
After many years of asking myself what art is for, I’ve arrived at this: the role
of the artist is to reach across space and time and console — to offer, not a
cure or a prescription, but, rather, non-trivial consolation.
Jeff is our great, wry, American consolation-poet. I don’t mean this
abstractly: to see him play is to find yourself in a crowd of people being
actively consoled — being moved, reassured, validated, made to feel like part
of a dynamic aural friendship. Jeff told me once that what he’s trying to
communicate to his listener is: “You’re OK. You’re not alone. I’m singing to
you, but I also hear you.” A testimony to the value Jeff places on this
connection: after playing a number of solo acoustic shows in 2016 and 2017, he
decided to make an album of those songs that seemed to speak most directly to
those audiences.
WARM is that album.
Great art is really just great personhood in compressed form — a distillation
of a human being that thrums with that being’s exact flavor. I’ve had this
feeling meeting writers like David Foster Wallace, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison:
a sense that years of hard work had refined what was personal in them into work
that, though infused with particularity, has blossomed into universality. I
have this feeling about Jeff and his music. The true mark of style in any art
form is that, within a few seconds, you know who the artist is. Listen to five
seconds of WARM and you’ll know it’s Jeff — by the sound of
the guitars (the musical heart of the album is the circa-1930s Martin 0-18 that
has been heard, at least a little, on every Wilco album, and is used on every
track on this record) and by that magnificent voice: friendly (but formidable);
tender (yet skeptical); edgy (but warm); but also by some other quality that
seems, once things get going, to be present even in the pauses, some essential
Jeffness that has come to be a vital component of my inner life over my many
years of listening to him.
For a long time now, it seems to me, our culture has assumed that the function
of art is to warn, to blame, to critique, to scoff, to dismiss. And those are some
of its functions, for sure. But an art that only does those things is
destructive. Destruction already being the dominant mode of our culture, we
don’t need any more of it. Anyone who advocates “burning down the house” has
likely never been inside a building on fire. By what do we really live? Our
lives — our real lives — are made almost wholly of attempts at tenderness. We
work hard on behalf of those we love, daydream about their future happiness, go
out of our way to save them even the slightest pain, comfort them when the pain
arrives just the same.
Jeff is, to my mind, a warrior for kindness, who has made tenderness an
acceptable rock-n-roll virtue. By “tenderness” I don’t mean that New Age thing,
where someone drives a spike through your head and you place hands palm-to-palm
and do a cheesy deep bow while thanking them for the new coat rack. No:
Tweedy-tenderness is sophisticated and badass and funny. It proceeds from
strength and good humor and does not preclude being angry or tough or peeved. It
is based on the premise that you are as real as he is and as deserving of
attention, and that the world is worthy of our full and fearless interest, just
as it is.
A poet is someone who lets language respond to language, trusting that meaning
and sound are good friends who, given a little room, will work things out. Jeff
writes by getting a musical track together and then humming / mumbling along
until he finds a melody, which will start forming itself into words and
phrases, while he waits patiently to see what he has been wanting to say. This
is a remarkably sensitive method that lets meaning come out on its own terms,
as subtly or overtly as it likes, and I am somehow put in mind of fireflies
(lightning bugs, as we used to call them in Chicago), swelling into brightness
and then being gone, as you ask yourself: did I just see that?
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.
“I leave behind / a trail of songs,” Jeff sings in “Bombs above,” “From the
darkest gloom / to the brightest sun.”
What can a song do in this world? Well, you know. It can open a person right up.
It can jolt you out of some bullshit state of mind, of sloth, of hubris. It can
make that dead world out there suddenly come alive. It can make you (father,
husband, son / mother, wife, daughter) newly aware that time is short and
whatever love you have had better get spent, pronto. It can make you fond of
things — and of the writer — for causing all of that newness to appear in your
tired, old, habituated mind, which, under the influence of the song, is a kid
again, on a summer day.
WARM is one of the most joyful, celebratory, infectious collections
of songs I’ve heard in a long time. It’s intimate and yet vast and feels
lovingly made, by actual people, in some particular place, and not inside a
computer. As I was listening, I kept picturing a tight little cabin in the
woods somewhere (the woods of Chicago?) under a big yellow moon, with four or
five Jeffs in there all playing different instruments, and Spencer on drums,
and Susie and Sammy are there too, and there’s a fire going, and a feeling of
love and discovery and fondness in the smoky air.
Also in there, I think, is the spirit of Jeff’s father, Bob Tweedy, who passed
away in 2017. His death was, as Jeff puts it, “the death that most people would
sign up for.” That is: he had what is called a “good death.” There was some
concern that the family might not make it to his side on time, but they did,
and he passed surrounded by love, everyone rising to that profound occasion,
and apparently there may have been some singing involved. This is not the death
everyone gets, but Jeff’s father got it, that strange and much-to-be-desired
blessing. How must it affect one’s view of the world to see someone you love,
at the end of his life, get the merciful gift of a dignified release? And so,
one of the things I find coursing through this record is gratitude, even joy,
that such a thing can happen, along with a sense of wonder at the realization
that death, for as much as we fear it, does not actually negate anything, or
anything essential.
“Oh, I don’t believe in heaven,” Jeff sings, in the title track, “I keep some
heat inside. Like a red brick in the summer: warm when the sun has died.”
What’s the red brick? That would be us, you and me. And Jeff too. Where does
that warmth come from? What is that mysterious thing that is sustaining us,
moment to moment (even in this moment), by infusing us with love and curiosity
and a desire to go on?
Exactly, says Jeff.
— George Saunders
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