After years of doing things the hard way to brilliant effect—Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the masterful afterbirth of very public labor pains, while A Ghost Is Born burrowed under the skin to the festering core of addiction—Jeff Tweedy takes the easy way out with Sky Blue Sky, relaxing into a groove with his band and actually allowing himself to have fun. And, damn, if he isn’t just as brilliant refracting light as he was sparring with shadows.

Sky Blue Sky doesn’t lay you flat on first listen, the way Yankee and Ghost did. It invites you in, disarmingly, like a shy suitor who wants you to stay. “Maybe the sun will shine today,” Tweedy sings on the opening line of the opening track, setting the tone for the CD. “Maybe I won’t feel afraid.” The band picks up the thought and turns a simple acoustic line into shimmering currents that ebb and flow, mirroring Tweedy’s reflections throughout an album which, like its predecessors, is meant to be heard in its entirety, iPod Age be damned.

“I trust no emotion / I just believe in locomotion,” Tweedy declares on “You Are My Face.” Proving his point, the band slow-burns into one of those Ghostly, full-body Wilco vamps that feature the band, and particularly avant guitar god Nels Cline, whose work on this album is a marvel of subtle implosion.

“Impossible Germany” (“Unlikely Japan”) is one of those marvelous Tweedyian turns of phrase that makes its own kind of crazy sense. “This is what life is for: be out of place,” he instructs us in life lesson #2 (Or is it #3? There’s one on almost every track). If Sky Blue Sky had come out before Lost in Translation, I have no doubt that Sofia Coppola would have snagged several of Sky’s unflinchingly honest, truly grownup love songs for her movie’s soundtrack.

“Please Be Patient with Me,” Tweedy asks gently, instead of demanding sympathy, as he’s sometimes been wont to do. “I should warn you I’m not well.” Later, he stands in awe of a lover who offers the ultimate gift: “You leave me like you found me.” Then he pulls back for the Big Picture, moving beyond eros to agape and embracing the universe with “What Light”: “If the whole world’s singing your songs / and all your paintings have been hung / just remember what is yours is everyone’s from now on / and that’s not right or wrong.”

In a world of inflated celebrity egos, it’s a remarkable gesture of generosity. It’s also just plain enlightened, like the rest of Sky Blue Sky, which reclaims white light from the New Agers and gives it back to the misfits. “Please don’t cry, we’re designed to die,” Tweedy reminds us in the lovely closing track, which goes “On and On and On” and is destined to be played at hundreds, nay thousands, of weddings-to-be: “On and on and on we’ll stay together yet / until we disappear together in a dream. / I will live in you and you will live in me / until we disappear together in a dream.”