This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Amanda Petrusich is a music critic for The New Yorker, and recently she sat down in our studio to talk with and hear some songs from Jeff Tweedy, one of the great songwriters working today.

Jeff Tweedy is probably best known as the lead singer of Wilco, the band he formed in Chicago in 1994 as pioneers in the Alt Country Wave.

In recent years, he's been working more often as a solo artist,

putting out both books and records under his own name.

This month, he's releasing Twilight Override,

a triple album and a gorgeous, thoughtful meditation on time, aging, fear, and persistence.

We're currently living through a moment in which cross-pollination between genres is incredibly

commonplace.

But for me, when I first heard Wilco, I was floored by the ways in which Tweedy combined

a kind of punk scrappiness with that lonesome, yearning country sound.

It spoke to the parts of me that were angry,

the parts of me that were sad,

and the parts of me that were ecstatic just to be alive,

doing all the dumb, goofy, transcendent things humans do.

His work still feels that way to me,

as though it contains everything.

Someone's cell phone comes sailing down. The bones of the books we never found.

The lights on the ridge winding around. Shadows in their shadows

On drugs on drugs

Crawling on the ground

...