Jeff Tweedy can seem like a guy who's been reading Bob Dylan's biography backward. Once he was associated with a stolid American roots classicism, an august, honest kind of rock that just hums along and doesn't need to be explained. Then, with a changed band, he took that idea apart, challenging and amping up the music, causing a stir. Now he appears to be blowing minds alone, with voice and guitar.
This isn't exact chronology. Mr. Tweedy has been doing solo shows, sporadically, since 1997. (There was one other full-fledged solo tour in 2001.) And even in the old days, the original version of his main band, Wilco, could stretch out pretty well on a song. But Mr. Tweedy has gotten so wickedly effective as a solo performer that he could make that his main gig, should he want to. And without belaboring the influence, he has mainlined Bob Dylan - the brusque collision of popular song forms; the rich, imagistic language; the audience-baiting.
Wilco is on break: the fans will have to be temporarily satisfied with a live album ("Kicking Television," which came out this week from Nonesuch). Meanwhile, Mr. Tweedy has been making a new record with a side-project band, Loose Fur, and touring on his own. On Wednesday at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center, he played a free concert, part of a weeklong series put on by Wall Street Rising, the nonprofit organization promoting the cultural life of the area of Lower Manhattan around the World Trade Center's former site. Introducing the show, the producer of the concert series, Michael Dorf, hit on a perfect malapropism: the organization, he explained, was "using the arts to bring people down."
That's it. Mr. Tweedy is a bringdown, a chronic ebb-tide personality. He might be depressing to watch if he weren't so irritable, and so good. Tetchy at the sound of acceptance, he fought with the audience members who threw it at him, mildly berating song-requesters. (One, yelling for the Wilco song "Radio Cure," was answered by a curt explanation that the easiest way to get him to play a song was to be quiet. The fan then yelled, at the same pitch, "Sorry!" It was an indie-rock moment.)
Running through 22 songs, including a few with Wilco's other guitarist, Nels Cline, on lap acoustic guitar, Mr. Tweedy stayed in tight focus; it helped that the sound was superb. (Mr. Cline opened the show by testing out the room's acoustics with a half-scorching experimental solo guitar set.)
There is no better way than a solo show to appraise Mr. Tweedy's lyrics, which are getting progressively spikier, sharper, more alive to internal rhymes and rhythms, less reliant on sentimental cliché. He showed this not just in image-glutted songs like "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" ("I am an American aquarium drinker/ I assassin down the avenue") but also even in toss-offs, like a new one written for Loose Fur about Jesus returning as, uh, a crack addict. (The opening line was "He's having supper with the upper management of a new regime.")
Mr. Tweedy's songs, which have chord progressions sometimes reminiscent of those of the Beatles, Memphis soul, rural blues or Dylan - and are sometimes just based on riffs and drones - radiate wariness, a stalemate between desire and self-recrimination. "Someone Else's Song," "Black Eye," "Sunken Treasure": the sound of defeat just kept on coming. His smoky, scraped-out voice did its job in that respect, but he let it be known, with a minimum amount of peacocking, that he is a performer. At climaxes, he pushed that voice high for effect, and though it sounded strained, he hit all the notes in tune.