Jeff Tweedy
At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Toronto on Tuesday
“This is the most adorable we’ve ever seen him,” a woman whispered in the sold-out crowd. And didn’t she have that right? The uncombed Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy was indeed endearing at the first of his two solo shows at the soft-seated Queen Elizabeth Theatre, where he looked pleasantly dishevelled, bantered in a charmingly woozy manner and tried many things but never his audience’s patience.
Surrounded by a serious collection of acoustic guitars and bathed in bright light that showed his rumpled self clearly, Tweedy played not only Wilco music, Uncle Tupelo music, Woody Guthrie music, new music and side-project music, but with himself and his audience too.
“I really prefer the earlier, more experimental sandwiches,” he said early on during his soulful 20-song set, referring to his lunch at Sky Blue Sky, a local Wilco-themed restaurant. “It seemed a little safe.” The quip was a playful jab at the music critics who favour Tweedy’s adventurous Wilco material to the Chicago band’s more recent and more traditional alt-rock.
Looking as if he had pulled himself out of a suitcase five minutes before the performance, Tweedy’s strumming and occasional picking was pragmatic and occasionally bothered by details. Stripping down his band-conceived songs to folkier arrangements was an exercise worth watching and hearing, even if the challenge was slightly too much at times.
His reluctance to try Poor Places (from Wilco’s acclaimed 2004 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) was well warranted. And before he followed with a recast Hummingbird (a bouncy, Beatle-y piano-and-violin number on 2004’s A Ghost Is Born), Tweedy joked about high risks and low rewards.
A shaky boyishness marks the 43-year-old’s tenor voice, though it has a worn-in quality to it as well. His lyrics were impressionistic and curious – “there’s a random painted highway, and a muzzle of bees / my sleeves have come unstitched, from climbing your tree” – and sometimes sad and sensitive – “Why,” he wondered on I’m Always in Love, “is my heart full of holes?”
There’s always been a troubled quality to Tweedy. He can be a bit prickly on-stage, and in 2008 he wrote a piece for The New York Times detailing his interrelated bouts with depression, migraines, anxiety attacks and self-medication. He’s recovered now – headache-free for four years – and yet his manner still seems to belong to someone who needs to be looked after. One suspects that his fans feel that, and, moreover, are attracted to it.
So, when the “disposable Dixie cup drinker” sings I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, his audience smiles and chooses not to believe him. And when he offers the sweet folk-blues of Please Be Patient With Me, the fallible Tweedy is warmly obliged, freely so.
Opening the concert was Toronto’s Snowblink, a newish he-she pair whose dreamy electric folk music was moon-lit and stream-fed – a sort of deep-woods Jenny Lewis or Leslie Feist. They tenderly employed reverb-enhanced guitars and vocal-looping effects. Other bells and whistles were, well, actual bells (decorative, chiming ones, handed out to audience members to achieve a sound that surrounded) and true whistling (by the duo’s male half). It was all rather serene, if slightly spooky, and quite delightful, as you might imagine.
Jeff Tweedy plays a second show at Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Wednesday, and Montreal’s L’Olympia on Friday.
