After producing albums for
Low,
White Denim, and
Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy set out to create a solo album. From the start, the album was intended to be more than simply acoustic guitar and vocals. While recording demos, Tweedy's son Spencer joined him to record drums and "[help] the songs take shape". Tweedy had most previously worked with his son when they both appeared on the split single for the "Songs For Slim" series in 2013.
Sukierae was completed mostly by the two of them, but also features additional vocals by Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of the band
Lucius, as well as keyboards by
Scott McCaughey. In an interview with The Atlantic, Tweedy spoke about the creative process of making the album and why he decided to release it as a solo album instead of a new Wilco album: "I like to include elements of early recordings on the finished records when I can. Almost every song on Sukierae has an original demo element somewhere in there. A lot of my iPhone acoustic demos became the basic tracks we overdubbed to, and they're still there in the finished record. (That's why we listed the iPhone as an instrument in the track notes.) The song "I'll Sing It" includes a cassette recording from a "Being There" -era demo of that song. Stuff lies around forever, and for this record it was fun to make some use of it. "It's a totally different process working with an ensemble. Wilco is a six-piece band, and its members have varying degrees of interest in the finishing touches. As a collective, we always gravitate towards something much more fully realized—and that's the pleasure of it. Working on my own, I always hope to abandon something before I feel like I've made all of the choices that could be made. If I commit too much to one approach, I mourn all the choices that weren't made when I get to that point. I think that's one way Sukierae would have been different if it had been recorded by Wilco. I can still hear possible overdubs on every track, I can still hear things I could have done, and that's the most enjoyable part for me. It's the same thing I love about Daniel Johnston's music—all that unrealized potential." In the meantime, all members of the band have released or appeared on numerous albums, from one-off collaborations, to their more closely related projects of
The Autumn Defense and
The Nels Cline Singers. In an interview with
The Guardian Tweedy shared his thoughts on the Album as a format in 2014. He also elaborated on the creative process of sequencing Sukierae as a
double album: "I've just made a double album,
Sukierae, which has two distinct discs. I understand in this day and age there might not be many people who will listen to it that way, but it doesn't matter – because I want to listen that way. I'm not a curmudgeon, a luddite or anti-modern technology doomsayer. I just want to listen to the album and have a feeling that one part, has ended, and now I can take a little breather before I listen to the second part. Or I can listen to the second part another time. It's a double record on vinyl, so there are three breaks like that. I wanted it to have different identities artistically and the album format allows me to do that." "Working toward
Sukierae I must have written or recorded around 90 songs. I was pretty sold on the idea of two really good-sounding vinyl sides, but no matter how we tried to sequence the songs, we kept getting halfway into another record. Then, in the last couple of weeks of recording, I had this burst and recorded five new songs, which all started to feel like part of a whole other record. So, we sequenced it as disc one and disc two. The album gets simpler and softer and bolder at the same time. The idea is that as it winds down it gets clearer." ==Touring band==