Listen to the Jeff Tweedy interview

Alternative-country music lost its poster boys late last year when the band Wilco released Being There, an ambitious, often brilliant two-disc set. Oh, the music was rootsy, but the roots were in British rock ‘n’ roll and songwriter Jeff Tweedy’s record collection.

“Everybody seems to focus on Gram Parsons and Neil Young and all that stuff with us,” Tweedy says. “I always find it really weird. It makes me think nobody has paid that much attention to the bands that are probably more operative in describing Wilco.”

Tweedy grew up idolizing the Kinks and Mott the Hoople, and their influence has guided his writing. He says, only half-jokingly, that the other day he listened to one of his favorite old Kinks songs, Sitting in My Hotel, and “realized that I probably ripped off the idea behind that song in maybe 13 different instances on this record.”

That tune deals with loneliness and life on the road, a recurrent theme on Being There. It’s an old lament, but a particularly personal one for Tweedy. He became a father a little more than a year ago. Now that he’s on the road again – Wilco performs on Tuesday at the Vogue- he has time to think about all the time he’s not spending with his son.

And on the disc, when Tweedy rhymes “Dimetapp” with “Spinal Tap,” it’s an indication of his desire to balance parental responsibilities with the rock life.

“I’d spent a lot of years thinking about one thing, kind of monomaniacally directing all my energy toward music and wondering if I was going to be able to switch gears enough to be a good dad,” he says.

So far, he says, he’s been successful at being Spencer’s father. Thus far in music, Tweedy’s done better critically than commercially. He spent a half-dozen years as part of the highly regarded band Uncle Tupelo, whose first album, No Depression, provided the title for the fan magazine that documents the alternative-country movement.

When that group split about two years ago, he formed Wilco, and Jay Farrar started Son Volt – another alt-country favorite. But Tweedy didn’t want to spend his career writing rock-edged country songs or doing a contemporary take on old-time country.

“We never really saw ourselves as that,” he says. “We never really thought that was the goal or the idea behind the band, to be part of a country-rock thing. We went into Being There saying we want to not think about that and do things that are honest and what we really like.”

That attitude permeates the entire package, from the deliberately Beach Boys-like sound of Outta Mind (Outta Sight) to the two-CD format. Rather than try to jam 75 minutes of music onto one disc, Wilcodecided that two discs would be more manageable.

“At some point during a 70-minute listen, you’re going to start thinking about all the things you’re supposed to be doing,’ Tweedy says, laughing.

“That was what was great about (vinyl) records – 15-20 minutes on a side and then you either listened to the other side or you got back to it in a couple of days and you know where you left off. With CDs, if you listen to the first half, you never really go to the middle of a CD and start listening to the second set.”

The extra disc cost more – and Wilco isn’t a wealthy band. To cut costs, they used cardboard cases rather than the standard plastic jewel boxes and took a royalty cut.

That was generous, wasn’t it? “Well,” Tweedy says, “it’s a percentage of nothing, so it doesn’t matter.”