The way Jeff Tweedy tells it, “Twilight Override” — his new triple album, with 30 songs on three discs — got its start on a road trip.
Tweedy, who leads the long-running band Wilco, was planning a four-hour drive with his two sons, Spencer and Sammy. He decided it was a good occasion to listen all the way through “Sandinista!,” the 1980 triple album by the Clash: a sprawl of brash, style-hopping songs and studio experiments. Soon, the idea of making his own triple album took hold. In a video interview, he jokingly dubbed the new album “Sad-inista.”
A triple album is “counterintuitive,” he said. “By giving somebody a lot of music to luxuriate in, you’re setting up a little barrier. But it’s also for a certain type of listener to be rewarded. And I just thought that it flies in the face of a culture that’s gotten faster, more surface level.”
The album’s working title, Tweedy said, was initially “Triple Rainbow.” Then it was “Tons of Time.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with aspiring to explore a different length, and to see if I can hold somebody’s attention for two hours, and hold my own attention, and allow songs to be around a bunch of other songs that wouldn’t necessarily make the cut if you’re going for maximum impact,” he explained.
“The idea of being able to facilitate someone spending two hours doing something like listening to a record intentionally — I don’t know if very many people are actually going to do that. But I think it’s designed to do that. And that’s what I wanted to do.”
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