The Current presents

Jeff Tweedy

with Sima Cunningham

Doors: 6:30 p.m. | Performance: 7:30 p.m. 

INFORMATION | TICKETS

Jeff Tweedy

Jeff Tweedy, founding member and frontman of , is one of contemporary music’s most respected songwriters and performers. In addition to 13 Wilco albums, he has released four solo albums and authored three New York Times bestsellers. In anticipation of his fifth studio release, Twilight Override (out Sept 26), this solo tour offers fans a rare chance to experience songs from Tweedy’s expansive catalog in a more intimate setting—spanning both his solo work and Wilco favorites.

When you choose to do creative things, you align yourself with something that other people call God. And when you align yourself with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction. You’re on the side of creation. And that does a lot to quell the impulse to destroy. Creativity eats darkness.

Sort of an endless buffet these days—a bottomless basket of rock bottom. Which is, I guess, why I’ve been making so much stuff lately. I mean, is the world getting darker? Sure feels like it. What is it? Is it the pervasive nagging toothache of dread that comes from the disintegration of a country that you thought you knew and understood? A home you still love with a love that could never be taken away, regardless of how painful that love has become? That sense of decline is hard to ignore, and it must be at least a part of the shroud I’m trying to unwrap. The twilight of an empire seems like a good enough jumping-off point when one is jumping into the abyss.

Twilight sure is a pretty word, though. And the world is full of happy people in former empires, so maybe that’s not the only source of this dissonance. Could be how old I’ve managed to become without warning. My own personal twilight. Whatever it is out there (or in there) squeezing this ennui into my day, it’s fucking overwhelming. It’s diΜcult to ignore. Twilight Override is my effort to overwhelm it right back. Here are the songs and sounds and voices and guitars and words that are an effort to let go of some of the heaviness and up the wattage on my own light. My effort to engulf this encroaching nighttime (nightmare) of the soul.

What I really want to do is grow my heart big enough to love everyone. And if I want a heart big enough to meet this moment, it requires something expansive. “Like a TRIPLE record!?,” you ask? Yes! Like a goddamn triple record! I mean … what else do I have but my songs and my family and my friends? What else do any of us have to keep the lights on? How else can I generate my own light? To me, any song, no matter the subject matter, can be a point of light and that’s one of the reasons I try and make so many of them. They all have the potential, even the heaviest music on the earth has the potential, to lift someone up.

I’m aware the day ends and the sun sets no matter how hard we wish for it to lift itself back out of the ocean. But it rises again. And what we do in the darkness matters. In a way, these three records represent the past, present, and future. A response to the feeling that we’re stuck in the worst part of the day, saying goodbye to the future we woke up to, waiting for it to get dark enough to dream up a new day. In all these songs I’m dreaming. Of who I once was, who you are now, who we could be.

Truthfully, I’ve been doing this for a long time. And I’m not going anywhere. This is the stuff that works for me. Feeling free. Making records with my friends (in this case James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, Liam Kazar, and my children Sammy and Spencer) and adding my voice to a song that never ends. Because I can’t sing and be afraid at the same time. And dreaming at twilight isn’t forbidden. Not quite a daydream and nowhere near a nightmare. Twilight dreaming is a lovely workaround. Killing time with slant rhymes, key changes and harmonies. Feel free to join us all here. Not singing into the void or at the void. Just singing. In spite of the void. Feeling good. Together. It will do you no harm. Sharing this music with the world is the best I can do.

Sima Cunningham

Sima Cunningham is a Chicago-based musician, songwriter, producer, presenter, and a founding member of Finom. Her second solo album, High Roller, was released in August 2024 on Ruination Records. Heartfelt and adventurous, her solo music is for fans of Harry Nilsson, Fiona Apple, Wilco, Aimee Mann, and Big Thief.

Over the past 15 years she has worked as a recording and touring musician with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, Iron & Wine, Edith Frost, Chance the Rapper, Twin Peaks, and been featured on multitudes of records. She co-owns a recording studio in Chicago, Fox Hall, where she produces records for her own projects and other artists.

In 2015, Sima formed Finom (fka OHMME) along with Macie Stewart, and it has been her primary project for the past decade. Finom has been celebrated as “the heart of the Chicago music community” by Vice Magazine. They have released three acclaimed albums including Parts (2018), Fantasize Your Ghost (2020), and Not God (2024) with Joyful Noise Recordings. The band has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, Pitchfork, Paste, Chicago Tribune, Spin, Interview, and Rolling Stone, and was recently commissioned to write and perform a piece with Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet and Orchestra.

An Armenian-American artist and descendent of genocide survivors, Sima has focused much of her work on building connections and healing divides through music. Over the last ten years, she has traveled to Armenia and the Caucasus to perform, participate in workshops, and foster creative cross-cultural opportunities between artists in Armenia and the United States. Her work as an artist-presenter includes founding a small music festival, Postock, that will celebrate its 16th year in 2024; curating and hosting the I Hear Voices series in Chicago at Constellation; and working as a lead organizer for the Pitchfork Music Festival.