20+ Years of Jeff Tweedy Driving

Yesterday morning I walked into the lobby of my office building and heard a Tremfya commercial playing over the PA but glitching every few seconds. Now I can imagine a future where DJs scratch the side effect warnings from pharma ads into their sets. Arguably music?

Jeff Tweedy Road Testing Music

On the podcast we released this week (#237), Tim Wasem (from The Erasable Podcast) joins us to talk about Jeff Tweedy’s solo album, Twilight Override. I think we all agreed it’s our favorite of his solo albums. We discuss our favorite songs, common themes running through the album, and I even sing a two-line earworm.

We also touch on the charming and possibly unprecedented two-hour video of Jeff driving while listening to the full album and occasionally singing along. I didn’t get to mention on the pod that this video ties to Wilco’s history and Jeff’s creative process.

In I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, the documentary about the production and creative tumult around Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jeff Tweedy drives around Chicago listening to demos of YHF (at 1:18 in the video below and elsewhere in the film, if memory serves). The director Sam Jones describes the same thing happening when pitching the film: “Jeff drove me around Lake Shore Drive playing early demos of songs that would end up on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.”

Beyond testing demos, one of the album’s most enigmatic voices, and the album title itself, were born out of Jeff driving around and listening to a box set of shortwave broadcasts of coded messages. (Arguably music?) From American Songwriter in 2013:

Shortly after World War I, mysterious shortwave radio stations began cropping up on long-dormant frequency bands across the globe. These stations, dubbed “Numbers Stations,” are thought to have been created for espionage purposes. Allegedly, government agencies would broadcast encrypted messages to undercover spies, who would then decode the messages using a one-time pad, or cipher key.

At any given time, a radio listener could dial into one of these stations and hear an artificially processed voice reciting strings of phonetic alphabet and numeric code; transmissions intended to be heard exclusively by just one person.

In 1998, Akin Fernandez, owner of London-based imprint Irdial Records, compiled more than 100 unearthed recordings of Numbers Stations into a 4-disc box set entitled The Conet Project.

In the years leading up to the recording of Wilco’s fourth studio album, the Irdial set was a staple in frontman Jeff Tweedy’s car stereo. The singer was especially intrigued by the compilation’s fourth track, “Phonetic Alphabet – Nato,” in which an alleged Mossad agent repeatedly speaks out the abbreviation “YHF.”

The agent’s accent is tough to assign, though she delivers each word in a cold, comprehensible monotone: “Yankee…hotel…foxtrot…”

We have written about and discussed Wilco many times in the newsletter and on the podcast. The image at the top is my used Wilco x Field Notes notebooks, a surprise product I discovered at Solid Sound. Here’s a playlist of Jeff Tweedy and Wilco deep cuts inspired by a solo Tweedy show this February.

Zine Deadline

We are working on the annual Take Note zine: a commonplace book made up from our last year of notebooks. If you are donating any amount to our Patreon by December 5ish, we’ll mail your copy anywhere in the world. We aim to get it to you before 2026.