Jeff Tweedy’s post-depression era

“No depression” has been used to describe a strand of alternative American roots music since the early ‘90s, but for Jeff Tweedy, whose music helped inspire the phrase, the two words now have a more immediate and literal significance.

Two years after going through rehab for anxiety disorders and addiction to painkillers, the singer and songwriter says he feels like a new person. And Tweedy figures that the change is bound to come through in new music he’s started recording with his band Wilco, one of the most acclaimed groups in American rock.

The Chicago-based band’s 2005 Grammy for best alternative album became the subject of one of many running jokes Tweedy worked into his solo concert Thursday at the Fillmore Auditorium.

During the nearly two-hour show, the capacity audience listened in reverent silence as he played acoustic versions of his poetic songs, then fans whooped and bantered raucously with Tweedy as he displayed his developing facility as a stand-up comic.

During an interview at his hotel earlier in the day, the 38-year-old musician, who also quit cigarettes a year ago, looked physically leaner and lighter in spirit than he did during a 2002 interview, a time when the storied record-label conflict over Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” album added an extra stress to his chronic conditions.

“Yeah, I probably wasn’t feeling too good then,” Tweedy said Thursday. “My body’s been through a lot of changes, and psychologically I feel like I’ve grown up a lot in the last two years, and I feel a lot healthier all the way around.... I have to think that whatever has always inspired me [musically] is probably more intact, being healthier, than it was before.”

Laid bare

Tweedy’s periodic solo tours -- the current one includes shows Sunday and Monday at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood -- used to be designed to try new material. But he likes to keep things more under wraps now, and has other reasons for going out as a lone troubadour.

“I think it’s just good for me as a songwriter to do,” he said. “It’s a fun change of pace. I get to play a lot more songs, a lot different songs. it’s a lot easier to move fluidly from all the different records....

“It’s the most naked experience you can have on stage and at the same time the most invigorating for a songwriter, being reminded of what it takes to make a song work,” he said. “I’ve always had this paranoia that a song isn’t really working unless I can play it by myself.... I like that idea that you don’t even really need a guitar for a good song. Just be able to remember things and remember your life that way.”

Tweedy reduced it to the true basics at the very end of the Fillmore show, stepping completely away from the microphone and singing his old Uncle Tupelo song “New Madrid” unamplified from the front of the stage.

It was a memorable climax to a career-spanning performance that reaffirmed Tweedy’s position as one of rock’s distinctive American voices. Set to light shuffles, bluegrass picking, folk-boogie and country strums, his dusky, everyman voice gave easy entry to troubled self-evaluations and tender, wounded love songs.

Tweedy, who makes up his sets as he goes along, ventured beyond such Wilco favorites as “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” and “Theologians,” fiercely reviving the Uncle Tupelo take on the mountain spiritual “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Go Down,” and returning to religious imagery in “Ruling Class,” a new song by his side group Loose Fur that rowdily describes Christ returning as a crack-smoking dandy.

The other new song was one Tweedy wrote for Solomon Burke’s 2002 comeback effort. It didn’t make it onto the veteran soul singer’s album, but it closed the main part of the show with a sweet bang, its classic, Memphis-style shuffle framing Tweedy’s impressively high-range vocal and prompting a sing-along on the refrain “we can make it better.”

That one could be a hint of Wilco’s future. Tweedy said during the interview that a soul music influence is emerging in the music that’s forming for the next Wilco album, which he hopes will be out at the end of the year but more realistically expects in early 2007.

After sessions of arranging and recording in August and December, Tweedy is enthusiastic about the new lineup. Wilco has never released two consecutive albums with the same personnel, but the enlistment of keyboardist Pat Sansone and Los Angeles guitarist Nels Cline -- known for his jazz, rock and experimental adventurism -- might change the pattern.

“The only idea I can think of that I’ve been chasing is this idea that great rock bands reinvent themselves and stay true to what they’re into, and don’t pander to their audience,” Tweedy said. “I think the lineup changes have obviously contributed to the records’ always being different. But I also don’t know if that comes first or the fact that the music was changing forced the band to reconfigure each time. I think it’s a little bit of both.”

Tweedy had trouble describing the new music, but he has a clear idea what kind of Wilco album he wants at this point.

“If I could make the record exactly how I want it to be, it would just be a record that you’d make out to and dance to. I don’t think I have as much desire right now to make riddles or be puzzling. Everything is so [messed] up in this world right now to me, I just think it’s a really good time to remind ourselves to dance.

“If we give up on the visceral beauty of playing rock music and just enjoying it on its total emotional level ... I just feel like that’s letting the bastards win....

“I still believe in that about as much as I believed in anything in my life -- that there’s real transcendence and joy and community in rock ‘n’ roll,” he said.

“All the best parts of people coming together can be found in music -- rock concerts, and the experience of listening to records with your friends, and becoming more human by being reminded of your feelings through a great record. I believe in all of that stuff.”