WARM

AlbumNov 30 / 201811 songs, 39m 46s
Alt-Country Singer-Songwriter
Popular Highly Rated

Coming just weeks after the release of his memoir, *Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)*, Jeff Tweedy’s proper solo debut, *WARM*, can’t help but feel a little confessional. Musically, the 11 songs don’t seem markedly different from his 20-plus years leading Wilco, but chronicling his family’s history and his struggles with addiction in the book forced changes in the writing style of an artist whose most acclaimed album opens with the line “I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue.” “My mind has always been inclined to pick out little details and paint around the edges of a scene, so I had to force myself to find the core of the story and paint a picture more clearly,” Tweedy tells Apple Music. “And then I felt like I had to stay in that mindset to write lyrics.” Like the newly minted storyteller he is, he takes us through *WARM* track by track. **Bombs Above** “A person I was in rehab with said this thing to me about suffering. But it kind of predates me really digging in in earnest on the book, so that kind of shoots my theory to shit.” **Some Birds** “This is me trying to be more direct about feeling helpless and not knowing what to do with my anger these days. I hope it doesn’t come off as cynical though. It’s a pretty dark period, but it’s worth the effort to care and to believe. I hope that’s the part of the record that comes through the most.” **Don’t Forget** “That song maybe set the tone and laid the groundwork for this more direct approach and has the most direct connection to the book. Early on, the lyrics to that song were more oblique.” **How Hard It Is for a Desert To Die** “The things we think of as the most severe and unforgiving environments still have a rich, deep life to them. And some of the worst experiences I’ve had have given my life the most shape and I’ve learned the most from. I think that’s what this is about.” **Let’s Go Rain** “I was playing solo acoustic shows and wanted to play some new material. And almost every night, I could get people to sing along with this song they’d never heard. So, if you’re looking for affirmation, that’s pretty great.” **From Far Away** “The drums seem so disjointed and unrelated to the song, but it somehow still all holds together. And the lyrics are about the same thing: We all feel pretty separate and different from each other, but the further you zoom out, the more it all holds together.” **I Know What It’s Like** “I just didn’t know of another song that used that phrase. It seems almost too obvious, but it’s exactly what I want to say to people who are going through something. At the same time, it’s testing the limits of empathy—nobody really ever knows what somebody else is going through.” **Having Been Is No Way To Be** “Peter Ivers had a TV show in the ’80s called *New Wave Theatre* and was murdered. He had a fascinating career—he wrote that song ‘In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)’ from *Eraserhead*, he was a harmonica virtuoso and played with Muddy Waters. This started off as me trying to fit a whole bunch of that into a song and then giving up and just making it about myself. That’s more like most of my songs—skirting around the edges of something until something else appears.” **The Red Brick and Warm (When the Sun Has Died)** “These two songs are both reactions to the same set of circumstances. The first is a more violent reaction and, in my opinion, an unsustainable one. And the second is the way I truly feel: There is an innate hope that it’s not worth my effort to kill.” **How Will I Find You?** “I never know where to put longer songs on an album, except either first or last. I was trying to imagine what someone like my father, who believed in an afterlife, would be thinking while looking for my mom, who died before him. If there’s really something like a Heaven the way that most people picture it, this seemed like a really sad and lonely thought.”

“Certain lyrical flowers sprout up with regularity across the ten song-yards that are this record. A son who has lost a father sings to his wife, his sons, that father. There are apologies, and mirror-twins; threats to enemies (‘I’d love to take you down / and leave you there’) and entreaties (‘Let’s go rain again!’) and dreamy challenges (‘I wonder how much freedom we can dream’) and ornery morphings of language that serve a simple function: they make the listener love language again.” – George Saunders, Liner Notes for Jeff Tweedy’s WARM Warm is a solo album of all new material, produced and recorded entirely by Jeff at Chicago’s now legendary studio, The Loft (with help from some of his usual collaborators – Spencer Tweedy, Glenn Kotche and Tom Schick). WARM follows the acoustic retrospective release, Together at Last (2017), and Wilco’s 2016 album, Schmilco.

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8.3 / 10

On his first ever collection of original solo songs—a companion piece to his recent memoir—the Wilco leader uncovers himself like never before.

8 / 10

Tweedy returns to form on book-accompanied solo album

This solo record boasts moments that upend Americana as beautifully as ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ did with US indie rock

8.0 / 10

In his new memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy describes the songs on his first proper solo album of original material as “some of the most direct, personal and autobiographical that I’ve ever written.”

The Wilco frontman's latest explores anxiety over music that can recall his most country-influenced work

Hope and compassion are not emotions people often associate with rock & roll -- joy, rebellion, fury, lust, and exhilaration are usually parts of the formula, but few people think of rock & roll as the equivalent of a warm hug from a good friend in a time of need.

Jeff Tweedy's latest album, WARM offers a welcome dose of head and heart at a time where both ought to be celebrated a little more.

9 / 10

Something of a stocktaking connected to his new memoir, WARM is Jeff Tweedy's first proper solo expression, and playfully and earnestly refl...

Lacklustre effort from the standard-bearer of thinky Americana | Gigwise /> <meta name=

8.5 / 10

History is often perceived and represented as past tense. Moments and movements that happened, taught in a way in which we can't change these things, but dissect them, eventually learning how to move forward with what we've extracted from their happenings

8 / 10

Sometimes, we begin by looking back. ‘Warm’, Tweedy’s follow-up to 2017 acoustic retrospective, ‘Together at Last’, finds

(dBpm)

The album comes close, in both timbre and tone, to reflecting the unvarnished Tweedy that shows up at his solo shows.

8 / 10

Twenty-three years after Wilco's debut album and 28 years after the first Son Volt release, it seems odd that Jeff Tweedy is just now getting around to...

7.0 / 10

Jeff Tweedy makes a soft and soothing album for himself and a niche crowd in our review of the bright but extremely laidback 'Warm'.

The Wilco frontman’s 18th album as a principal player shows he’s still twisting familiar elements into appealing shapes

75 %

WARM plays more personally than much of Tweedy's work.

8 / 10