In this article:
What type of music is it?
Settling in with fatherhood
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Online extra Complete Apolo Ohno interview

Musical musings of Jeff Tweedy and Wilco
Their long-awaited new album, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," garners respect from peers and enjoys attention from fans.

By Steven Chean

Jeff Tweedy hopes you'll find it. It's there, waiting to be found -- percolating beneath the jangling acoustic guitars and zigzagging synthesizer buzz of "War on War". It's a truth, sung as truthfully as Tweedy can sing it: "You have to learn how to die if you want to be alive."

The "old" days: Tweedy and Wilco in 1998.

"If I have any belief, that's it," he says. "And I don't mean just accepting your mortality, although that's part of it. I mean, if you don't risk failing, falling flat on your a--, you probably have very little chance of making something beautiful in life."

It's a sentiment Tweedy, 35, has lived and died and lived by. In his personal life and, most recently, on "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", the long-awaited new album of his band, Wilco. "War on War" and the CD's 10 other tracks make for a textured sound collage -- one part shimmering pop, one part unfettered experimentation. It's the type of album that can make or break a career. Or both.

If "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" earned Wilco its walking papers -- the group's longtime record label deemed the album uncommercial -- it prompted the courtship of some 30 other labels. And it has only enhanced Tweedy's reputation as a singer-songwriter, not to mention Wilco's status as one of the country's most respected bands. "They're a band every artist with ambitions beyond being a top-40 flavor of the month has to acknowledge," says Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot. "Every one of those artists has to ask themselves, 'Can I make an album as good as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot?' "

Ask Tweedy what type of music Wilco makes, and he'll politely reply: "I don't know. I'm sorry." Ask him where his group fits in the current music landscape: "We're in some people's record collections." When it comes to music, his lifelong love, he's that rarest of creatures -- an uncalculating innocent. "I just want to make records I like to listen to. I blame that on my childhood."

He still owns a stack of "really beautiful yellow and blue and red plastic kids' records" -- holdovers from his childhood in working-class Belleville, Ill., where he grew up the youngest of four children. His father, the supervisor of a railroad switching yard, and his mother, a kitchen designer, indulged his preternatural turntable tendencies. "My mom put records on for me before I could operate the turntable. Before I could speak, she says, I would point to it."

It was inevitable, really, that the boy who methodically absorbed his siblings' record collections would one day emerge on the other side of the turntable. Initially, Tweedy was a creative force behind Uncle Tupelo, the groundbreaking group that infused the twang of vintage country into indie rock, concocting a new genre, "alt-country." Later, he re-emerged as the centerpiece of the ever-changing lineup that is Wilco, whose first three albums -- 1995's A.M., 1996's "Being There" and 1999's "Summerteeth" -- are studies in leaps-and-bounds artistic growth, the outfit shedding its country-rock roots en route to grand experimental-pop pastures. Yet, Wilco's strikingly beautiful music tends to mask pained lyrics of young-man innocence buckling beneath adult-man responsibilities.

Music is Tweedy's means of expression; it's also the substance of that expression. "I'm myopically driven to not just be a musician, but a music fan in every way," he says. "About six years ago, that caught up with me. I was about to be a father, and I had this crisis situation about growing up."

With wife Sue Miller, former owner of the Chicago club Lounge Ax, Tweedy is now the father of two boys, Spencer and 2-year-old Sam. And although he has confronted his "crisis situation," he still can recall his frame of mind, and frequent anxiety attacks, with vivid detail: "When I worked in record stores, or lived in an $80-a-month apartment when I was playing with Uncle Tupelo, I had a naive sense of well-being. When Spencer was on the way, I had this overwhelming fear of change -- of letting go and losing what was important to me."

One listen to "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" reveals a brighter perspective, reflecting a hard-won, distinctly mature sense of well-being. Spencer and Sam have provided their dad with a new outlook on life. "I've learned I can be a great father and a music freak, because love grows exponentially when you have kids," Tweedy says. "They've taught me to be awake, aware and appreciative of my life, and that's only made me better at both."

"Jeff's kids mean the world to him," says Sam Jones, director of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart", a documentary chronicling the making of the new album. "They're bright and extremely musical, and you can just tell that comes from spending a lot of time with him."

Despite the demands of touring, Tweedy spends as much time as possible in his Chicago neighborhood. The industrial loft that serves as Wilco's recording studio is within walking distance of home -- close enough for the kids to watch Dad work and still make it back in time for family disco parties. "Every Friday night, right after pizza, we break out the disco records, and everybody dances," Tweedy says with a chuckle, reminded of another truth, one he sighs in "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"'s closing refrain: "I've got reservations about so many things, but not about you."

"I like that one," he says. "It [holds] lots of promise."

Freelancer Steven Chean last wrote for USA WEEKEND about Elvis Costello.