As a sought-after sideman, Liam Kazar has spent years of his life on the road, most recently alongside his sister Sima Cunningham and other long-time pals comprising the members of Jeff Tweedy's band on tour supporting the Wilco frontman's September 2025 release Twilight Override. The touring lifestyle, while one to which Kazar has adapted, can preclude him from participating in some of his most treasured activities, ones that allow him to use his hands and senses, arts that trend domestic rather than public: woodworking, to some extent, but most notably cooking. With all of that travel, the one thing that has continued to elude him has been a sense of home, so he has created one musically.
All of his loves, musical and otherwise, seem to find their way onto Kazar's latest album, Pilot Light. On it, we find nods to picnics, simple pleasures, and life lived slowly, set to steady, Sunday morning-ready grooves. While Kazar's 2021 release, Due North, offered a bit more sonic experimentation, PL still feels full, featuring some collaborators of many years, including Cunningham on backing vocals and friend Spencer Tweedy on drums, and was recorded at the place Sam Evian and Hannah Cohen share in the Catskills: Flying Cloud Studio. We get the sense that this work was held and championed by loved ones on its way into the world—and I'm told there was some good eating going down during the process as well.
As soon as Kazar joined our virtual conference room on a quick break from the tour, I was struck by the beauty of the wood paneling behind him, planks running parallel and suspended from the ceiling of his loft space in his parents' Chicago home, forming a soothing, symmetrical backdrop for our conversation. He confirmed having made it himself, so of course, we had to begin there.
Meredith Hobbs Coons: Hold on. You do woodworking?
Liam Kazar: Somewhat casually, yeah. I'm in the attic of my family's home in Chicago. I live in New York, but during the pandemic, I fixed up their attic like a little studio apartment for when I'm home, and it includes this wood detail. I appreciate you asking, because I'm proud of it.
Meredith: You should be proud of it. That's gorgeous. So that ties into the DIY aspect of your process. You compose, you write your own music, you sing, you perform, you play. What's your relationship to the recording process?
Liam: Recording is, weirdly, my Achilles heel. I write music almost entirely on a guitar, an acoustic guitar, and I just make little voice memos. I've been touring since I was 17, and I'm 32 now, so I'm 15 years into doing this. The middle part of writing songs and playing shows is recording the music, and that's, weirdly, the one that I've probably done the least of those big three, of writing, recording, and playing. I think I've probably played more than almost anybody my age, because I've made a living as a touring musician, more so than as a studio musician. I'm starting to record a lot more now, but I'm not an engineer. I like the tactile, hence the relationship with building with wood and stuff like that. I also like to cook a lot. I like using my hands. I just haven't been good with computers, and for so much of recording now, you really need to know your way around one.
Meredith: Yeah, it's pretty 'in the box' these days. So when you were 17 and beginning to record, that was with Tweedy, the band, correct? Or was that with someone else?
Liam: That was with an old band I was in with a bunch of friends from high school called Kids These Days, but it was being recorded at the Wilco Loft with Jeff Tweedy. He was helping us make our first record. I joined Jeff's solo project when I was 21. I've been playing with Jeff now for over ten years, and it's actually the longest I've been in any band, which says something about me, I guess—not a good thing about me, maybe. Bands are hard, you know.
Meredith: Why would that not be a good thing about you?
Liam: I've been in many bands, but I'm usually only in them for two or three years, or something like that. That's what happens when you're just a hired musician. But I love being a hired musician, because I get to play so many different kinds of music. I mean, I've done a year with maybe eight different bands now, and that's eight different catalogs of music. You learn different things from everybody you tour with.
Meredith: Your influences on Due North and Pilot Light seem pretty eclectic. Do you feel like that's a byproduct of the musicians you've played with?
Liam: You know, I've been making records since I was a teenager, and I've always gotten the note of sounding eclectic, so I think that might just be me at this point. Every record I've ever made has been referred to as eclectic. Maybe they are. To me, I'm just writing songs right the way I hear them. And maybe they sound like a wide breadth of styles to people, but to me, it sounds like an expansion of where all my songs start, which is me with an acoustic guitar.
Meredith: Do you want to talk about your influences a bit? Maybe some that might surprise people?
Liam: Well, there are things I've taken from people that aren't necessarily musical influences, but sort of like 'guiding principles' influences. Like, I think Duke Ellington is the greatest band leader of all time, and I think about the way he conducted himself as a band leader and as a musical force in America. I draw influence from that. I aspire to the way he treated people and the way he kept his train moving forward for 50 years. He's my favorite American artist, and I listen to him probably more than those I may rip off musically, or those that people think I rip off musically.
Right now, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac has been at the front of my brain for the last couple of years—right before she passed, actually, and then even more so after that. I just think she's one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and she does something that I think is really underrated and hard to do, which is to get directly at saying exactly what you're trying to say with one single phrase. She was so good at that. "Loving you is easy," you know. It sounds simple, but it's not. And her songs are really distilled. She's been a huge influence on me.
Meredith: That's beautiful. Who do people say you rip off?
Liam: Well, I've looked like Bob Dylan since I was a kid, and I still do in some ways—you know, curly hair and acoustic guitar. I don't play a harmonica because that's just a bridge too far, but any guy who picks up a guitar, I think, is going to draw that comparison. I've certainly had that. It's funny, the people that I actually am ripping off, no one would ever guess. Speaking as, like, a white guy playing guitar. And 'ripping off' is such a harsh way of saying it. The point being, I've never seen somebody refer to a man as ripping off Joni Mitchell, because I think people just don't make the connection that a man might rip off a woman, or vice versa, even. But that happens all the time.
Meredith: Christine McVie—they wouldn't make that comparison.
Liam: I think people just can't help their predisposition to what a person's identity is when they see an artist.
Meredith: Yeah. I hear some interesting influences in your music. I'm wondering how far off I am. I hear some Bobby Charles.
Liam: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
Meredith: I actually detect some—I don't know how I feel about this—James Taylor?
Liam: James Taylor, no.
Meredith: Okay. I hear some Stevie Wonder.
Liam: Absolutely, yeah. Two out of three. That's pretty close.
Meredith: I think that the reason why James Taylor sticks out for me is that Pilot Light, in particular, has kind of a breeziness and an easy-going quality to it. It's weekend music. Like you would put it on and cook breakfast. There are references to picnics and learning Urdu, and a sort of slower pace in your songs.
Liam: I'm glad to hear you say that. I think the last three years have been extremely busy for me, with traveling, touring, and stuff, and I kind of lost track of what home really is as a concept. When you're gone more than you're home, maybe for a small stretch, you're like, "Okay, this is just like a traveling period, but I'll get back home," but once you get into that second year—and then, in my case, it was three years of traveling over 200 days a year—the whole concept of home becomes foreign. I think I was writing this record trying to reconnect with the idea of a home. I live in Brooklyn now, and, going into this year, the word in my head was "home." I was like, "I need to have a home again." And even though I'm still traveling a lot, I've just consciously tried to turn my apartment into my actual home. Maybe that's where some of that breezy [quality comes from], just fantasizing about having a real home again—not a house, but a home.
Meredith: Music can absolutely conjure home, and yours did for me.
Liam: Yeah. So I made some home music, hopefully. "Weekend at home music."
Meredith: Yeah, "Sunday brunch at home music." I love that. Speaking of physical places, you did this album—or a large chunk of it, at least, at the space I most coveted when looking through Spencer Tweedy's Mirror Sound book, which is Sam Evian's place in the Catskills. It looks so dreamy. There's, like, a creek nearby . . .
Liam: Yeah. I call it the 'Green Palace'—Flying Cloud Studio in upstate New York, run by Sam Evian and Hannah Cohen, two of my closest friends in the world. I played in Sam's band for a few years, he mixed my first record, and I'm just a massive fan of his music. I think we're even more connected as lovers of cooking. And there's no one I feel more at ease cooking a meal with than Sam.
They redid their kitchen a few years ago, and they now have all this nice butcher-block counter space. He and I can be working on a meal together—there's music playing in the background, he's got something on the stove, and I'm working on a side dish or a salad or something—and I think that's in the music. When you're working with Sam, you're jumping in the creek, even if it's January and it's basically below freezing water, and you are working really diligently for like five or six hours, and you're getting so much work done, and you don't even realize it, because Sam and Hannah both make the work process a seamless, natural thing. And then you call it a day, make a meal that takes two hours, and just enjoy each other. In the summertime, you can't see any of your neighbors, because there are trees everywhere, and that's why I call it the 'Green Palace'. It's one of my favorite places on earth.
Meredith: That sounds beautiful. What are some of your favorite meals that you make together?
Liam: I recently did a wet brine on some bone-in pork chops—some thick, butcher-cut pork chops. We were doing a three-day session out there for a different friend, and each of us took a meal. Sam took a meal, I think Hannah took a meal, and I took a meal, and mine was bone-in pork chops. I was really proud of how those came out. I slow-roasted them in the oven, then charred them on the grill at the end. I think that might be the most well-executed protein dish I've ever made. That was fun.
Meredith: Yeah, it's interesting how cooking is also something that creates a sense of home.
Liam: Oh yeah. I mean, "Pilot Light," that song, that lyric, is a cheeky reference to a bunch of critters in a home. "Pilot Light" as a title was sort of a metaphor, or a sort of poetic stroke, for replacing the idea of just saying home. I could have called the record 'Home,' you know?
Meredith: No, 'pilot light 'is interesting. You've got to keep it lit if you're going to have a working furnace in winter.
Liam: Yeah, and if you've got an old stove, maybe you have one on the stove as well.
Meredith: It's cool that you are a multi-disciplinary artist. You've made your lovely wooden backdrop. You like to cook. You like to be very hands-on. And then your biggest musical inspiration is Duke Ellington, who was himself a painter.
Liam: That's right, he was. I mean, cooking and writing music are very different, but cooking and playing music are, I find, parallel. Writing music is more like coming up with a recipe. But I like that with shows, you just play it, and then it's over. And it's sort of like that with cooking: You make the dish, and then it gets consumed, and it's on to the next one.
Meredith: They're ephemeral.
Liam: Yeah, they're fleeting in a great way. I can't paint, though—although my niece likes drawing, and I've started drawing a lot more with her. I think through drawing with her, I'm getting better, but I'm sad I have never had a painting, drawing, or sketching practice.
Meredith: You mentioned your niece. She went on tour with you guys, right?
Liam: Yeah, I'm on tour right now with Jeff Tweedy, and my sister is also in the band, and her daughter is coming out for short little stretches on the road. It's great. It reignites the whole tour, in a way, at least for my sister and me, and a few others in the band who are really close to my niece. You know, you get in your adult ruts and your adult ways, and then this little kid comes in, and it's like a tornado of fun and craziness. It ruffles all the right feathers.
Meredith: Is that the first time that you've toured with a kid coming along for a stretch of it?
Liam: Yeah. My sister's done it a lot with her kid and with her band, Finom, with Macie Stewart. Macie is also in the Jeff Tweedy band, and Spencer Tweedy has toured with Finom. So they've all toured with her. I haven't. This is my first time touring with her.
Meredith: I got to chat with Finom for the podcast that my co-host and I have done: Wilco Will Love You. And on that podcast, we chatted a bit about the song that your sister, Sima Cunningham, wrote about you ("For Liam"). How was that for you?
Liam: I mean, that song is a dagger every time. She's playing it, and I'm seeing the two of us—old, decrepit, lost our minds, and sitting in chairs next to each other—I just lose it, you know? It's really one of the sweetest things anyone's ever done, her writing that song for me.
Meredith: I imagine you're getting to hear that song a bit on this tour, because Jeff Tweedy is having his supporting band members open different nights of the tour. How has that been for you?
Liam: That's working out great. What I'm loving about this tour is how much music we're all playing. Jeff loves to play, we love to play, and we're playing beautiful old instruments. I've been playing this Martin from the '40s, named Molly, and it's just the perfect guitar. We're playing new covers every night. We play a song every night, every show, that we only play in that one town. And on this whole tour, I like that we're rotating the opening, because we like to play for about an hour before we go on stage. We get in our dressing room with just acoustic guitars and little practice amps or whatever, and just play a bit—whoever's opening that night misses most of that. It's just all music all the time, and not every tour is like that. Not every tour do you want to be like that, you know? But this tour feels great for that. It's just beautiful —'family music hour,' or hours.
Meredith: When Macie and Sima were on the podcast, we spoke about how the Wilco fan base has really absorbed all of you.
Liam: Oh, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, in the most generous terms possible. They really are such a lovely audience to play to—so receptive, so open to hearing something new. It's a dream.
Meredith: Is there anything that you really wanted to talk about that you haven't had a chance to talk about yet?
Liam: That I really want to talk about? Certainly nothing about my music, nothing about my life. You know, I'm in Chicago, and Chicago is being completely terrorized by these federal agents, these ICE assholes right now. Everywhere, they're destroying our fucking communities of hard-working people. I could say, "Fuck ICE," and that would probably sum it up for me.
Meredith: Has that hit close to where you are?
Liam: We've been traveling, so not since I've been here. But so many of the people I follow on Instagram are my friends and community from Chicago. It's just down the block. It's everywhere, and this fucking terrorizing, making example of Chicago, and peacocking that Trump is trying to do is just horrendous, reprehensible. And shame on those assholes taking a $50,000 bonus to come arrest and kidnap innocent, hard-working people.
Meredith: Well, I'm really glad that you said that. That's important stuff. I know that you're touring the East Coast primarily. Have there been other cities where you've seen some of this?
Liam: We were in DC, and this doesn't really have anything to do with ICE, but I do enjoy every time I go to DC, just going to the mall and seeing the monuments, because they're gorgeous. And I had seen that picture circulating of people demoing the White House, so I walked over to see it. And you can't, of course. Those cowards know that what they're doing is wrong, so they've put up these walls to hide the fact that they're doing this dumb thing. You can't even get that close to the White House on the side where they're doing it. But I went to the Lincoln Memorial and looked at the reflecting pool, and it's still a beautiful place. This land, all over.
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