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Sep 15, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Sammy Tweedy Wilco

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy has announced a new solo album, Love Is the King, and shared two songs from it, “Guess Again” and title track “Love Is the King.” Love Is the King is due out digitally on October 23 via dBpm (the physical release date is TBA). Tweedy has also announced a drive-in concert for this Friday, September 18, at McHenry, IL Outdoor Theater (get tickets here). Check out “Guess Again” and “Love Is the King” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Love Is the King is Tweedy’s third solo album in as many years and follows 2018’s WARM and 2019’s WARMER. Wilco also put out a new album, Ode to Joy, last year. On October 13 Tweedy is also releasing a new book, How to Write One Song is due out October 13 via Dutton. That follows his 2018 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). So, yeah, Tweedy has been busy.

Tweedy had this to say about Love Is the King in a press release: “At the beginning of the lockdown I started writing country songs to console myself. Folk and country type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting way. ‘Guess Again’ is a good example of the success I was having at pushing the world away, counting my blessings—taking stock in my good fortune to have love in my life. A few weeks later things began to sound like ‘Love Is the King’—a little more frayed around the edges with a lot more fear creeping in. Still hopeful but definitely discovering the limits of my own ability to self soothe.”

Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon has also written an essay on Love Is the King and here is an excerpt from it: “It was inside Jeff Tweedy’s second home, The Loft in Chicago, that Love Is the King was recorded in April of 2020, surrounded by an assemblage of treasured instruments and loved ones in a world that felt more and more alien by the day. Not long into Wilco’s North American tour, Tweedy’s natural instinct to return home was realized when all further dates were abandoned. He escaped the anxiety and dislocation of being out at sea during a worldwide crisis and fell into the familiarity of the studio. With his sons, Spencer and Sammy , by his side, he set the task of writing and recording a song a day until they held an album in their hands. Creativity/music was their comfort food. Rather than directly addressing the significant disruption unfolding outside, Tweedy looked inwards and examined the matters that fear, separation and vulnerability pulled focus on.

“The candor with which he calls upon the nourishing elements of nature, gratitude and love is effortless. His wisdom is frank and possesses a glorious wit as he accepts without resistance the inherent duality of living and loving.

“Songs unfold with the poetic structure of short films—his language poised and concise, personal but collectively shared. Comforting country songs paint vivid scenes of escapism. Songs of separation become eulogies to the love he is apart from. He sings of the world falling apart and whistles a solo. Joy against sorrow.

“Poetry and music animate the human struggles associated with a particular time more so when they don’t attempt to sing to the times directly but allow them, unfettered, to permeate the process.

“The initial impetus was to self-soothe as a family and shield in the comfort of creativity. However, on Love Is the King, Tweedy has balanced the books and penned a beautifully honest ode to love and hope. He has documented a time in history through the personal lens of shared human experience.

“There is solace here for all who need it.”

Read our interview with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on Ode to Joy.

We previously posted our review of Ode to Joy and you can read that here.

Plus read our 2015 joint interview between Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Australian singer/songwriter/guitarist Courtney Barnett, from our Best of 2015 issue.

Love Is the King Tracklist:

1. Love Is the King
2. Opaline
3. A Robin or A Wren
4. Gwendolyn
5. Bad Day Lately
6. Even I Can See
7. Natural Disaster
8. Save It For Me
9. Guess Again
10. Troubled
11. Half-Asleep

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