This is the 18th album Jeff Tweedy has made as a principal player – with Uncle Tupelo, with Wilco, with his elder son (as Tweedy) and solo. It is a testament to his restless creativity that he’s still making worthwhile music, still twisting familiar elements into appealing shapes. The perfectionism and obsession of the middle Wilco years are a thing of the past. These days, Tweedy simply turns up to shows with his acoustic guitar and plays songs. Warm takes the same model, adding only drums, bass and electric guitar (usually to shade in the songs, rather than carry them). In a new autobiography, Tweedy writes about how uncertain he was about his voice in the early days of Uncle Tupelo, in comparison to his bandmate Jay Farrar’s, but that voice is at one with the music he’s making: a little ragged and frayed and – per the album’s title – warm.

With the book out at the same time as the album, it is tempting to look for autobiography in the lyrics. It’s there explicitly in places – the reference to the “long drive” he took with his son to reach his father’s bedside before he died. At other times, he is self-reflective, and the troubles of Tweedy’s past come up repeatedly. “Now people say / What drugs did you take / And why don’t you start taking them again? / But they’re not my friends,” he sings on Having Been Is No Way to Be; “Please take my advice,” he suggests on Warm (When the Sun Has Died). “Worry into your song / Grow away from your anger.”

There’s no need to be a Tweedy-ologist to appreciate Warm. It feels slight at first, but then the refusal to overembellish and overdevelop the songs brings them closer. There is nothing between the listener, the melodies and the lyrics – and the melodies are consistently strong, insinuating their way into the listener’s consciousness. Warm is an easeful record: it offers its appeal without supplication, or insistence. It’s really rather lovely.