What Jeff Tweedy doesn't see in the mirror

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Not that long ago, Jeff Tweedy made a startling discovery: “There’s more time between now and the beginning of my career than there was between the big band era and when my career began,” he said, his eyes widening slightly behind a chunky pair of glasses.“How does that happen?”In the late 1980s, Tweedy helped invent the idea of alt-country music with his band Uncle Tupelo; today he’s best known as the frontman of Wilco, which since 1994 has been steadily expanding the boundaries of American roots rock.Yet the 58-year-old has done plenty else across those four decades, including writing three books, producing albums by Mavis Staples and Richard Thompson and presenting a COVID-era variety show on Instagram with his wife, Susie Miller Tweedy (a former owner of the storied Chicago rock club Lounge Ax), and their two sons, Spencer and Sammy.His latest project is “Twilight Override,” a sprawling if homespun triple album under his own name with no fewer than 30 songs about love, travel, music, family and childhood.Tweedy cut the record at Wilco’s longtime Windy City headquarters, the Loft, with a band comprising Spencer, 30, and Sammy, 26, along with Sima Cunningham, Liam Kazar and Macie Stewart; this weekend he’ll bring those players to Los Angeles for a concert Friday night at the Belasco and another Saturday night at the United Theater on Broadway.To talk about it, I met up with Tweedy in January when he was in town for his annual solo engagement at Largo at the Coronet, where he’s been coming for years to try out new material and tell stories (and jokes) about the old hits.Does Tweedy, the devoted Chicagoan, like L.A.?“I like everywhere except for Indianapolis,” he said before one of the Largo gigs.

Seated backstage in a small dressing room, Tweedy grinned beneath a mop of fuzzy hair.“Indianapolis is fine.

But I don’t trust myself to judge any city, t...