Making music in the face of a family illness

Jeff Tweedy has made a lot of records, but the front man for the esteemed American rock band Wilco (and before that, coleader of alt-country outfit Uncle Tupelo) has never put out an honest-to-goodness solo album.

That will still be true come Tuesday, when Sukierae (dBpm ), the 20-song set credited to Tweedy (no Jeff), will be released. That's because although Tweedy performed almost all of the music himself, another family member also played a key role. Spencer Tweedy, his 18-year-old son, played drums on the double disc - as he will Sunday night, when Tweedy, the band, headlines the Merriam Theater.

"I've always been really happy bringing raw material for songs into an environment where a bunch of musicians are going to shape them into something none of them individually could have pictured happening," says the elder Tweedy, 47. "That's been really thrilling, especially when you get to play with wonderful musicians like the guys in Wilco."

Instead of bringing his song ideas for Sukierae to the band, Tweedy used Spencer, an accomplished musician who's been playing drums since he was 7 - and who recently joked on his blog "I am in a boy band named Tweedy" - as his sounding board.

That was an exciting prospect for Tweedy, who talked about the new album on the phone from his car one morning after dropping his younger son Sammy at high school in Chicago. "I really believe in this phenomenon of listening to music with other people and having it sound better," he says. "Just to hear it with the excitement of his young ears, and to have him perform the songs with me . . . . "

The kick of a father-and-son collaboration, however, soon took on a heightened intensity. Midway through the album's recording, Tweedy's wife, Susan Miller Tweedy, was diagnosed with a rare form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, for which she has recently completed chemotherapy.

"There's a presence of Spencer's mother and my wife in a lot of what's happening on this record," says Tweedy of songs suffused with intimations of mortality such as "Wait for Love" and "I'll Never Know," as well as soul searchers like "Nobody Dies Anymore," which reflects on the death of Tweedy's older brother Greg last year.

"The album is a great way to honor her and honor our family as something that can sustain this kind of stress, and have an outlet for it."

Sukierae is just the latest in Tweedy's career of collaborations. Since splitting off from Uncle Tupelo after four rustic, punky albums in the early 1990s, the railroad worker's son from Belleville, Ill., has been busy with Wilco, which debuted as an Americana band with A.M. in 1995 before evolving into what Tweedy calls "a little bit of a rock orchestra," with landmarks such as Summer Teeth (1999) and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002).

Tweedy has also dallied with indie-roots supergroup Golden Smog and the experimental trio Loose Fur, and worked with Wilco and Billy Bragg in putting Woody Guthrie lyrics to music on the much-loved Mermaid Avenue.

"I've never had an itch to scratch," says Tweedy. "Plus, I've always thought that if I was going to do a solo record, it should just be acoustic guitar and my voice, or something where I play everything. So having Spencer play with me was kind of a loophole, because of the DNA factor."

Tweedy produced both You Are Not Alone (2010) and One True Vine (2013) for Chicago gospel great Mavis Staples. On the latter, he and Spencer - who's taking a gap year before starting college next fall - played everything themselves.

Staples is "an amazing maternal figure for my whole family. She's like an angel. Spencer and I had such a great time that we immediately started working on this project." One reason for calling the new band Tweedy is that that's how Staples refers to him. "I don't think she's ever called me Jeff. I figure if it's good enough for Mavis, it's good enough for me."

Sukierae takes its title from a nickname Tweedy says his wife has been unsuccessfully attempting to get people to call her since she was 9. "When she learned that Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits had a sister named Sukie, she assumed that would give her an icebreaker when they met, which would lead to her marrying him."

The time was right for Sukierae, Tweedy says, also because Wilco needed a break. "When you play music over and over again, you wear paths through the forest of musical ideas, and you start to just take the same path every time. And I think the joy of playing with really good musicians is more rooted in cutting your way though the jungle. So this is a way of maybe giving it some time to get overgrown again."

Tweedy says working on the album helped his family cope with Susan's illness - she was actually diagnosed with two separate, unrelated forms of cancer, "a rare double whammy, and neither of them have anything to do with the other. But both are treatable and have a very positive prognosis. So we're very hopeful."

"It's been a really intense time for the family, and in a lot of ways, this record was a welcome distraction, and also provided some sense of normalcy," Tweedy says. "It was like, 'This is what we usually do. Dad's making a record.' Spencer's on it this time, so everyone's a little more engaged with how it's going. It was great."

His wife's illness inevitably made its way into the songs, he says.

"I think one of the reasons that music is so helpful to people is that they want meaning. They obviously crave meaning," he muses. "And as terrible as everything that was going on was, it gave meaning to everything that Spencer and I were doing. That's really where I hear it most. Just in knowing that as a document of this period, Spencer and I were working on this meaningful thing that our family shared."

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Tweedy, with special guest Hospitality

7:30 p.m. at the Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad St.

Tickets: $40-$45.

Information: 215-893-1999 or  www.kimmelcenter.orgEndText

215-854-5628

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