It's a sunny day, and I'm crying as Wilco's darkness is cheap, a track off the stalwart indie band's new album, Cruel Country, plays on a crappy Bluetooth speaker on the dining-room table that doubles as my desk. There are birds outside fighting at the feeder, and the sky is blue after days of rain and the endless gray that defined spring in Chicago this year. Frontman Jeff Tweedy's brittle voice fills gaps between the sparse instrumentation. A horn, a piano, a guitar. It's beautiful and sad in the way so many things are nowadays. Before I realize it, tears are rolling down my cheeks.
It's been a long few years. For me, for you, for Jeff Tweedy.
Amid the crushing isolation of the pandemic, divisive politics, and a creeping sense of powerlessness over it all, it was easy to feel lost and alone. As Tweedy, 54, sings elsewhere on the album, It's hard to watch nothing change. This wasn't the first time he felt adrift, and it probably won't be the last. But the past few years altered him, he says, in a way that feels new. Good, even. During this period of deprivation,
Tweedy says, it occurred to me that making music is really everybody trying to figure out how to have more good days than fucking bad days. Tweedy knows bad days. The beating heart of Wilco, he has publicly struggled with addiction and anxiety, depression, and debilitating migraines. Migraines so bad that when he was a boy, he'd vomit dozens of times in a night from the pain, regularly landing in the hospital for dehydration. A Vicodin habit to numb the discomfort came later-on tour in 2004, he'd pass out in the bathtub, thinking he might not wake up. Rehab kicked the pills, but the migraines still rage. He had one this morning, pushing our conversation back by hours.
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