I love Together At Last. As mentioned, it's testament to how great the songs are that they still stand up when performed by Jeff solo. I'm not very familiar with the Mavis records, but I love You Are Not Alone, which Jeff, Spencer, and Sammy have done several times on The Tweedy Show. I listened to Little Bit and loved it, so I definitely need to check out the rest of that record.
I need to pick up If All I Was Was Black as well as the two earlier Mavis Staples albums that Tweedy produced and contributed songs to. "Little Bit" is very good indeed and Mavis sounds great. I find it interesting that Tweedy has written in a more socially aware mode for other singers, but rarely tackles that terrain in his own music written for the band. I wish he'd do it more.
Did Jeff talk anywhere about why he wanted to do the Together album, as a studio recording? Richard Thompson and Randy Newman have done series of similar "songbook" albums. In some respects they are better equipped for it than Jeff because they're able to create a richer musical backdrop using only their solo instrument, while Jeff's playing is a lot simpler, so the absence of a band is felt more. But then, that also means there’s more contrast with the original versions. One thing I think this kind of record is good for is presenting songs from across the artist's career on a level playing field, removed from whatever the production and arrangement fashions of the time were. Richard did his initially as a kind of souvenir to sell at his acoustic shows -- maybe Jeff wanted to do the same?
My two cents : we should do one song a day at least for WARM, maybe even for WARMER. For at least three reasons : 1/ there's a lot to discuss for each song, because of their autobiographical nature and their link with the Let's Go book. 2/ Most are absolutely fantastic. 3/ I don't want this thread to end. There, I said it. Waiting for @Parachute Woman's decision, here's a little link for the other "side project" Jeff appeared on in 2017, the "Thank You Friends Big Star's Third" live tribute with an all-star band comprising Mike Mills, the Posies guys, Jody Stephens, Dan Wilson, Django Hastings, Pat Sansone and more. Pat sings lead on three songs (including a magnificent You and Your Sister), while Jeff shines on Kizza Me and Nighttime (can't find a link for that one). Both guys are killing it on When My Baby's Beside Me, a performance that really really sounds like vintage Wilco (think the up tempo tunes of Being There or their cover of Gram Parson's One Hundred Years from Now). Yep, this is irresistible nostalgic stuff !
I've gone back and forth on this question of one song a day or two songs a day, @Fortuleo. There's still quite a bit left to cover and even with double days for Warm/Warmer, plus Ode to Joy and Love is the King there is still a month of content left. So we've still got some path left to tread, my friend! Our numbers have definitely dwindled, but I think the passion is amazing in here. What the heck? We've got time. We'll go song by song. Warm Released: November 30, 2018 Jeff's second solo album and first one of entirely new material was released at the tail end of 2018 as a companion piece to his excellent memoir Let's Go (So We Can Get Back). One doesn't necessarily have to read the book to enjoy the album, but if you do you can hear how many of the songs reference specific ideas and memories from Jeff's own past. This was definitely one of those moments of taking stock and looking backwards for him, which he has done to varying degrees throughout his career. His father's death was also a major part of both the book and the album and Jeff's feelings of intense loss at becoming an orphan--which is still disquieting even when one is in their middle age. The Tweedy boys Spencer and Sammy both appear on this album but I can understand why it was credited to Jeff Tweedy solo rather than the "Tweedy" band. This is intensely personal stuff. The Sukierae project was all about the family and how they were dealing with something together. Warm and Warmer are Jeff Tweedy unguarded. (Warmer was recorded at the same time but released in 2019. We'll go right into it after we conclude Warm). Warm received strong reviews. NME called it "one to let simmer." The Guardian called it "frayed and intimate." Rolling Stone praised it for digging deep into Jeff's own fears and anxieties. They wrote, "But the easygoing arrangements on Warm bely a much darker, conflicted undercurrent running through Tweedy’s writing. If his longstanding difficulties and insecurities were always present just barely beneath the surface on Wilco’s classic records, they are starkly prominent and central to what is often a deeply moving new LP." It's an eleven track album with songs that vary in tempo, mood and length (one is barely over two minutes; another stretches past six minutes). If Star Wars and Schmilco felt like deliberate attempts to make albums quickly and to push away any pretensions, Warm is Jeff Tweedy fully embracing his singer-songwriter side and going for beauty, depth and patience. It also brings in a slight country edge and finds Jeff experimenting with his guitar playing (approximating the sound of a slide guitar without a slide guitar). It's a wonderful album. Jeff' solo work is just as special as Wilco to my ears. Bombs Above The opening track 'Bombs Above' is one of the tracks that draws directly from a specific story from Jeff's life, related in the book. In rehab, Jeff found himself feeling guilty for his addictions and struggles because he was this musician with a loving wife and family and he was hearing people tell stories from just horrific lives of terrible, terrible pain. He relayed this to a gentleman there who corrected Jeff and told him that we all suffer in our lives and it's not anything you need to justify. Jeff was very moved by this and the encounter is woven into the song. It's a good choice to open the album up, as it touches on many of the themes that Jeff will wrestle over the course of these albums. It's actually the briefest song on the album (2:15) and feels almost like an introduction or prelude to me. The faux slide guitar is here, another hallmark of Warm, along with Jeff's vulnerable vocals and powerful lyrics. He takes a moment to apologize, he reflects on his own part in the pains of his life and... I leave behind a trail of songs From the darkest gloom to the brightest sun A quietly intense opener to an album full of quietly intense songs.
Jeff did a lot of interviews around this time, promoting the book and album, which is great for us for many reasons. One of them: he did a lot of performances of tracks on the album. Here's a wonderful solo acoustic rendition of 'Bombs Above':
First, I'm really glad we'll do one song a day, especially starting with this sublime masterpiece. The suffering musician, expressing regrets about allowing himself to suffer, while he's contemplating all his privileges… He should've done more « to stop the wars », more protest songs, more political commitment, he should've been less self-centered. This is a guy looking back with regrets on his own self-centered songwriting. But in the process he's doing one of the best examples of self-centered songwriting you can think of, which is also the start of an album worth (well, two albums worth…) of self-centered songwriting ! Talk about "meta"! This song is an extraordinary Tweedy piece. The melody is fantastic. Once again, each note is anchored by a chord change, which is a very difficult trick to pull off. Please note that in the otherworldly acoustic version in @Parachute Woman's second post, he resuscitates his full blown high voice, to beautiful effect. Not mumbling at all! What a superb start…
Here's the exact passage in the book where Jeff gets into that encounter: "Because this was a very hard-core city hospital in an underserved neighborhood, there were stretches in my monthlong stay where I was the only white person there or the only person who didn’t come from a gangbanging background, situations that were much, much more serious than mine. So it was never lost on me that I was very fortunate to have a lot of support from a lot of people, including my band and my wife and my manager. I really didn’t have anybody in my life I was going to have to cut out to stay sober and get healthy. I would feel guilty. I’d sit in group sessions and listen to other patients talk about their lives, and what they’d endured was beyond anything I could imagine. They came from homes where they never felt safe; being physically and emotionally abused was just a day-to-day reality. Food was scarce, hope was scarcer, and it was a toss-up whether there was more danger outside or inside. One guy told us about seeing his father murder his mother when he was nine and that he had his first taste of alcohol that night because his father forced him to drink whiskey, thinking it would make him forget what he’d seen. Hearing a story like that made me ashamed of how little I had had to survive and how much pain I’d derived from so much less actual trauma. What was I gonna say when the group got to me? 'Um . . . I cry a lot. I get scared sometimes. I have headaches, and it makes it hard to make music.' That was the worst of it. I was out of my league. One time, after a group session, a few of us were in the smoking room and I confided to them, 'I feel like I shouldn’t even open my mouth. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I think my situation compares.' "This big black guy, who towered over me, turned around and started shouting at me. 'What the **** is that ****? Shut the **** up! We all suffer the same, mother******!' 'I’m sorry,' I said, backing away. 'I didn’t mean—' 'Listen to me, mother******, listen.' Getting right up in my face. 'Mine ain’t about yours. And yours ain’t about mine. We all suffer the same. You don’t get to decide what hurts you. You just hurt. Let me say my ****, and you say your ****, and I’ll be there for you. Okay?' It set me straight. I still think it’s one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. I was trying to put things in perspective by pretending I had no perspective, by denying my own feelings. It’s always going to be important to acknowledge someone else’s pain, but denying your own pain doesn’t do that. It just makes their pain relative to yours, like a yardstick to measure against. It’s a waste of pain. After that I started listening more and I started feeling again." Tweedy, Jeff. Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) (pp. 223-224). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. PW, it's important to note the racial component in that confrontation Jeff had, and how it differs from the more gentle, raceless version he incorporated into the song. It also underlines how racially naive Jeff was in a lot of ways, some that he caught here, some that he didn't. I would gather the awful situations he described in the first paragraph wouldn't be that much different from those of white working-class patients in a rehab in Belleville, but it didn't occur to him to make that logical leap. (And it may not have suited the overall point he was trying to make as a writer in this passage.) I'm forever seeing this awkward kind of racially-inspired self invalidation with white folks in NYC, which I'll write down to having limited experience among non-white people (a much larger cross section than just black). Living here has its merits and hard lessons, and it was encouraging to see a guy with compassion beneath his hard exterior teach Jeff a nice lesson in humanity. Sounds like that moment was the turning point for him. I gave Warm a run-through on youtube again, realizing I kept 6 out of 11 this time around. It actually sounds better than I remember, the reverb not bothering me as much on the vocals. You know what I think it was? Sukirae put me off the reverbed vocals so hard, that any sign of them going forward set me off. I still don't like them, but on at least half this album, it didn't sound as debilitating.
The songs on Warm and Warmer all blend together for me (in a good way). Partly because I got the double-vinyl set (with both in one package), and that's how I've mostly listened to them, all together, as one album. The songs also all mostly sound the same (again, in a good way). So it's tough for me to comment song-by-song. But yeah, to me, this is a feel-good album, and really pleasant, not "mellow", but laid back. Would like to put it on again soon, but I've been listening to Love is King... maybe I'll listen to Warm/Warmer, until my LiK vinyl shows up!
I've been quiet lately because I'm simply not familiar with Jeff's solo music, and even if I plug my phone into the stereo to listen to the tracks I can't form worthwhile opinions with one listen while I'm working. And while I'm familiar with the Staple Singers (and have even seen them in concert), I don't have that Mavis Staples album. It sounds like I should pick it up!
Warm has definitely been a "grower" for me. I bought it, listened to it a few times, and that was it. Somewhere along the line I finally read Jeff's book and it definitely shed light on a lot of the music on this record. I agree with @Parachute Woman that it is not necessarily a companion piece, but it well could be. It's easy to see how each project - the book and album "fed" off of each other. My wife and I traveled to Savannah, Georgia and saw Jeff play solo behind this record at an old theater on on of the downtown squares. It was a great show - and we both commented on how strong a lot of these songs are/were. I have not spent hardly any time with Warmer so it will be interesting going through both of these records in the next few weeks.
And the first verdict - "Bombs Away", that's a good song! Love the acoustic and electric guitar feel together
Big fan of Warm/Warmer here. I can still remember the first time I listened to both. Warm while in a family trip, so I streamed it. Warmer late at night on RSD, making a needle drop on first listen so I could take it on a work trip the next day. Both instantly resonated, much more so than Sukierae. I just listened to Warm/Warmer again on the weekend and they’re an easy listen. Sukierae, while having its moments for me, still feels like a bit of a slog to get through the whole thing in one sitting. But that’s just me. When I listened to the audiobook later on, it deepened the songs’ impact for me. Of course when Warm was released, we had no idea there was a companion album. Bombs Above is a very soft spoken way to start the album. The message about relativity of pain is a powerful fun. When you read the book you find out about his rehab facility. It wasn’t a celebrity one. In fact, as we explored earlier in the thread, Wilco weren’t financially well off around Yankee/Ghost and that was sometimes a source of tension. They had good revenue, but the whole enterprise cost a lot of money too. Going to rehab was a family investment and he went to “normal person” rehab, which was probably for the best anyway. Thanks @fspringer for highlighting some of the context here. Important observations. Many of the Warm(er) songs had been played frequently before the album came out and Bombs Above was among them. This is the version I was listening to a lot at the time (check out this Setlist: Bombs Above, We’ve Been Had, Locator, Jesus Wept, I’m the Man...): One little technical note: the effect Jeff worked hard to replicate on this album was pedal steel, which is a little different than slide guitar (although it is played with a steel bar, which acts as a slide). The biggest difference (of many) between a guitar and a pedal steel is that the pedals on a pedal steel can raise or lower the pitch of strings while you play it. That means you can slide into a chord with the bar, but then use the pedals to change the notes further without moving the bar. It’s typically played with a volume pedal too, which means you can have the volume down when you pick (I.e., there’s no “attack” sound from picking) and then fade then sound in. Combining the volume swells, the slides, and the pitch shifts via pedals gives a ghostly, ethereal, weeping sound. Jeff’s electric at 0:02 shows him imitating the pedal bends on a plain old electric guitar. It’s not full-on pedal steel style (the hardest move to imitate is when the pedals have some strings bending up and others bending down at the same time), but it’s “good enough” to get that weeping vibe. Jeff talked about this quite a bit at the time. These efforts are reflective of how we works in the Loft now. Sometimes he’s writing, but other times he’s just woodshedding a musical problem, trying to get a sound out of his head. I find his guitar work to be really effective on this album. Nothing fancy. It just sounds good.
Thanks! Yeah, I'm the first to admit that I'm pretty much a dummy when it comes to the technical side of things. I've gotten better in recent years (I hope) but I'm still pretty much your classic non-musician listener.
Knowing Warm was coming up in this thread I've started to stream it. So far I've come across some beauties. Bombs Above is a pretty good song. It has a terrific melody and the lyrics add to the overall feel about the song (normally I tend to overlook them). Next to the book, the posts of all of you are a valuable part in enjoying this new (for me) album.
"Bombs Above"- I'm looking forward to the discussion of these albums. I have both digitally, but never bought the cd or the vinyl. To be honest, I have never listened much or warmed up to these records. These will almost feel like new albums for me. Maybe at this point I was hoping for a different direction, instead of more stripped back songs with a country influence. They are not albums I dislike, but they have never thrilled me much. I thought the songs fell short from the last three albums. I loved Sukierae, Star Wars, and Schmilco, and my early thoughts were these records paled in comparison. That can all change with some closer listening and the help of persuasive comments from the lovers of these albums. I'm also not a fan of these album covers. I believe Sammy took these photos, but they are not helping sell records. I guess many things about the albums initially turned me off. That being said, "Bombs Away" is a solid opener and one of several songs on this album I did like on first listen. Although, I'm not so sure about this vocal. The hushed voice where he sounds like he is trying not to wake up the family, but I really love the vocal Ahhhs at the end. Why is this song cut off so short? They could have continued this a little longer with some bigger drums coming in. It seems to end when it starts to get really good. After about 5 listens to this song this morning I am already feeling that these songs take some time to reveal themselves. I'm sure I will come out these discussions with a handful of new favorites. 3.5/5
Thanks for the Mavis discussions. All of her recent work is really good. You can go all the way back to Have A Little Faith and be richly rewarded. My favorite is One True Vine. I'm excited about the Warm and Warmer discussions as well. Most of this will all be new to me. I heard a couple of random songs on the radio but nothing really stuck.
In all fairness, Jeff has been looking like he could saunter onstage at a Los Lobos concert, and no one would notice. It is strange how the band albums have artwork of varying sorts, while the solo albums are, er, photos of Jeff some might consider unflattering!
I have loved Warm since the first time I listened to it, which was before Jeff's book came out, and reading the book made me appreciate the songs even more. I'm normally a person who responds more to music than lyrics, but a lot of the lyrics on this one really resonated with me, and I think it's some of Jeff's best lyrical work.
I’ve been listening through for the first time while driving and have already saved a couple/three tracks to my library. Very nice. I will say, though, that the Hate Roger Waters crowd (on this forum) would have a field day with Jeff Tweedy and his bare-my-soul lyrics. (If one is feeling in too good a mood and wants to suffer a bit of depression, just wander into any Pink Floyd and/or formerPink Floyd member associated thread). Back to the album under discussion. I like it.
When Warm came out, I played it a lot and really liked it. There was just a certain, well, warmth, to the songs. And simply excellent lyrics. We're getting down the path into some "same-y" territory here, but it's still quality material. Over time, for whatever reason, I didn't find myself quite as attached to the album as I was in November/December 2018. But I still hold it in pretty high regard.
I'm coming to Warm for the first time and I like "Bombs Above" a lot. I think it's a great album opener and it does seem like something of a preamble given its brevity. I too wish that final section had been permitted to run a bit longer; it's gorgeous. I haven't ready Tweedy's book yet, but I think his feelings are ones that many of us might experience. I suppose it's quite natural to compare ones own difficulties and traumas to those of others when in a group session like that. This song is an eloquent way of addressing those feelings. Great start.
