Feeling Free

jeff tweedy cover

It’s been a beautiful few days over here. I’m still floating on a cloud after Mavis Staples announced her new album with a cover of Beautiful Strangers. Thank you to everyone who has reached out with your kind comments, I really appreciate them. This all comes in a year when I’ve really been loving and listening to a lot of new music, and feeling very inspired. Music is the absolute best.

I love years like this. 2025 reminds me a lot of my 2021 where I find myself working on a lot of new music while taking time off the road, though still playing just enough shows to scratch the itch of rock n roll. I feel creative, inspired and attune to what’s happening around me.

Back in January I ran into Jeff Tweedy at Largo when he mentioned that he was working on a triple (!) album - so I was excited to see it get announced a few weeks ago. I loved the four singles that dropped with the announcement - they seemed to jump right outta the speakers at me and I was immediately on board. Then last week, he dropped a bomb of a song called Feel Free.

Feel Free is a song that you wanna live inside of and as a songwriter you hear it and think “goddammit, I wished I would have written that!”. It has what every writer strives for - a hard earned simplicity that will feel relatable to anyone that hears it. It reminds me of what I love and miss most about David Berman - little vignettes that span the spectrum of human emotion, while also painfully American. It is, in my opinion, an absolute perfect song and one of his best.

It would be a fools errand to try and pin down my favorite line in the song, because if I were to go that route then I’d might as well just post the whole thing. Every new listen illuminates something I didn’t catch the time previous, so my favorite line is always a moving target. But the line that sticks out to me now, and maybe it’s because of the tragic news out of Minneapolis yesterday, is; feel free, get yourself born in the USA, love with a love they can’t take away.

I have a little cover of the song behind the paywall. It’s just me figuring it out at my kitchen table on a sunny afternoon here in Los Angeles on Katies El Dorado.

While playing it - I was reminded of when Katie and I covered Jason Molinas Farewell Transmission two months ago in Vermont. I kept getting choked up reading the lyrics off the teleprompter, wondering how it must have felt to write something like that, and reading the lyrics to Feel Free I found myself wondering the same thing.

xox km