Jeff Tweedy has never been one to shy away from excess when it feels necessary, and his new album Twilight Override proves it. Spread across 30 songs and three discs, the project captures his knack for weaving humor, vulnerability, and poetic strangeness into one vast canvas. Self-produced at his Chicago studio The Loft with longtime collaborators Tom Schick and Mark Greenberg, the album gathers contributions from friends and family including James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, Liam Kazar, and Tweedy’s sons Spencer and Sammy.

Five years after Love Is The King, which the New York Times called “surreal and acutely felt,” Twilight Override arrives as a sprawling act of defiance against despair. Tweedy frames the set as both a personal purge and a communal spark. “Creativity eats darkness,” he says. “Twilight Override is my effort to overwhelm it right back. My effort to engulf this encroaching nighttime of the soul.”

The three sections of the album each stand on their own but gradually knit together into what Tweedy admits became an accidental narrative. He didn’t set out to write a concept record, yet once the songs were arranged, the arc revealed itself. The opener “One Tiny Flower” is a playful parable about mortality, while “Out In The Dark” imagines a planet without a moon as a metaphor for creativity. “Stray Cats in Spain” brings the music closer to home with vivid personal detail, and the radio single “Enough” closes the album as a hard-earned meditation on acceptance.

Throughout, the songs balance whimsy and gravity. Choral passages rise out of quiet strums, oddball tales sit alongside stark confessions, and a sense of searching carries everything forward. Tweedy likens the work to confronting the decline of a larger empire while trying to keep his own light alive. “It is the light you’re working towards the whole record,” he says of the closing track. “Stop thinking so fucking much about things that you can’t control.”

Twilight Override may be Jeff Tweedy’s most expansive solo statement yet, but its real power lies in how personal it feels. The album’s 30 songs don’t just overwhelm the darkness, they invite listeners to join him in the act of pushing it back.