10 Years of Sukierae

A reflection by Spencer

Hi, Starshippers. Spencer here, older son of the Captain.

Earlier this week, it was the tenth anniversary of the first album my dad and I ever released together, Sukierae.

Believe it or not, this is what everyone was wearing at the time.

Time always passes weirdly, whether it involves album anniversaries or not. But this is an especially big milestone for me, because Sukierae marks the beginning of my life as a “professional” musician. We played our first shows to support the album (alongside James Elkington, Darin Gray, and Liam Kazar) three days after my high school graduation, when I was eighteen, so I guess you could also say it marks the beginning of my life as an adult. Sukie Tweedy the Person birthed me for real. Sukie the Album birthed me… as a grown-up musician? (I can hear my mom now: no one and nothing birthed you but me.)

Some of you might already know that Sukierae came about in an almost accidental way, in the afterglow of Mavis Staples’s One True Vine. Mavis and my dad had intended to make that album together as a duo, with sparse instrumentation. But when some songs called for drums, and I was near at hand, they decided to try me out. Mavis ended up working with a family band again. This time, ours.

When that album was finished, we rolled the same process into what was then an unnamed, undefined Jeff Tweedy solo project. We weren’t sure where these songs would end up, if they would even be released at all. Other than sporadic soundtrack work here and there, my dad had never released a proper solo album. And we had only just started recording together (direct-to-CD experiments of our earliest band, The Raccoonists, circa 2001 notwithstanding).

The songs that we accumulated over those eighteen months or so became Sukierae. Much of it we recorded in the three or four hours available to us after school. As soon as class let out I’d rush to The Loft to start what felt like my real day. Tom (Schick, producer-engineer), Mark (Greenberg, artist and Loft manager), and my dad would start their second work day with me.

Tom mostly mixed as we went. A plan only began to take shape after we had passed the twenty-track mark and started sequencing them. It would be a double album, like George Harrison before us, debuting with a big swing. And it would be credited to a mononym, Tweedy.¹

Throughout all of this, we were dealing with the anxiety and uncertainty of my mom’s cancer diagnosis. In the 90s, she had had liposarcoma, a rare type of chest tumor. By 2013 it had come back, and she was also diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

The outlook was good—we clung on to that—but it rattled all of us. My mom bore the brunt of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery and my dad bore the brunt of worry among the rest of us. He coped by reading medical studies and writing songs. I think it caused him to face inward, to circle the wagons and make something that felt like us. At a bare minimum, it added importance to the daily practice of creation. The album-recording process became even more of a refuge than it normally is. It was soothing to have control while something we couldn’t control was happening to my mom.

I’m proud of Sukierae. I’m proud of the versatility of the record and its unrestricted approach. The sound of my dad and me playing acoustic instruments in a room next to each other is a common thread throughout the songs. But there’s also wild exploration and sort of psychedelic homage to lefter-leaning influences (like Aphrodite’s Child and Neu!). Then and now, we’re always striving for “beginner’s mind” in the studio. During Sukierae, beginner’s mind was the only option.

Ten years on, I’m still in shock that this album happened. I grew up watching VHS tapes of Wilco on repeat, daily, torturing babysitters, miming my dad on a peewee Les Paul, imagining what it would be like to be in Wilco. By the time I was a teenager and my dad and I were working on One True Vine and Sukierae, I had happily accepted the fact that they were them and I was me. Then we hit record at The Loft and I started living my dream.

This Week in Wilco, Etc.

2011 / September 27: The Wilco album The Whole Love is released on dBpm Records.

2022 / September 27: Norah Jones’s podcast, Norah Jones Is Playing Along, debuts with Jeff as her first guest. Together they play five songs and share an hour-long conversation.

1989 / September 29: Uncle Tupelo opens for Royal Crescent Mob at Mississippi Nights in St. Louis.

2023 / September 29: Wilco’s 13^th studio album, Cousin, is released on dBpm Records.

1. To us, there’s no big difference between Tweedy the band and Jeff Tweedy the solo artist. Same Tweedys, same process, loosely. We just found that it was confusing to have a band, another band, and a man who’d toured solo-ly for twenty years already!